Catherine the Great & Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair

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MY SUCCESSES ARE YOURS

We shall glorify Potemkin

We shall plait him a bouquet in our hearts.

Russian soldiers’ marching song, ‘The Moldavian Campaign of 1790’

The favour of the Empress was agreeable;

And though the duty waxed a little hard,

Young people at his time of life should be able

To come off handsomely in that regard.

Lord Byron, Don Juan, Canto X: 22

On 11 February 1789, two hundred Ottoman banners from Ochakov were marched past the Winter Palace by a squadron of Life-Guards accompanied by four blaring trumpeters. The parade was followed by a splendid dinner in Potemkin’s honour.¹ ‘The Prince we see is extremely affable and gracious to everyone – we celebrate his arrival every day,’ Zavadovsky sourly told Rumiantsev-Zadunaisky. ‘All faith is in one person.’² Potemkin received another 100,000 roubles for the Taurida Palace, a diamond-studded baton and, most importantly of all, the retirement of Rumiantsev-Zadunaisky, commander of the Ukraine Army. The Prince was appointed commander of both armies.

Potemkin liberally distributed honours to his men: he insisted Suvorov, whom he brought to Petersburg with him, should receive a plume of diamonds for his hat with a ‘K’ for Kinburn.³ He ordered his favoured general straight down to Rumiantsev’s old command, where the Turks were already launching raids.^*1 The Prince promised Suvorov his own separate corps.⁴

The festivities could dispel neither the tension of Russia’s international position nor Catherine’s private anguish. After the dinner that night, Catherine quarrelled with her favourite, Mamonov. ‘Tears,’ noted Khrapovitsky, ‘the evening was spent in bed.’ Mamonov was behaving ominously: he was often ill, unfriendly or just absent. When Catherine asked the Prince about it, he replied, ‘Haven’t you been jealous of Princess Shcherbatova,’ (a maid-of-honour) adding, ‘Isn’t there an affaire d’amour?’ He then repeated ‘a hundred times’: ‘Oh Matushka, spit on him.’⁵ Potemkin could hardly have warned her more clearly about her lover. But Catherine, tired and almost sixty, did not listen.

She was so used to hearing what she wanted and so accustomed to her routine with Mamonov that she did not rise to Potemkin’s warnings. Besides, Serenissimus turned against every favourite at one time or another. So the trouble with Mamonov continued – ‘more tears’ recorded Khrapovitsky the next day. Catherine spent all day in bed and her consort came to the rescue. ‘After dinner, Prince G.A. Potemkin of Taurida acted as peacemaker’ between the Empress and Mamonov.⁶ But he only papered over the cracks in the relationship. Nor could the Prince solve all of Russia’s problems.

The leadership was divided over Russia’s worsening position. While it held its own on two fronts against the Turks and Swedes, Russia’s power was haemorrhaging in Poland. The Polish ‘Four Year Sejm’, now encouraged by Berlin, was enthusiastically, if naively, dismantling the Russian protectorate and throwing itself into the arms of Prussia. ‘Great hatred’⁷ of Russia was driving Poland towards reform of its constitution and war with Catherine. Prussia cynically backed the idealism of the Polish ‘Patriots’ – even though Frederick William’s true interest was the partition, not the reform, of Poland.

That was not all: Prussia and England were also working hard to keep Sweden and the Turks in the war. Pitt now hoped to recruit Poland to join a ‘federative system’ against the two imperial powers. This alarmed Vienna, where Joseph’s health was failing – he was ‘vomiting blood’. The Austrians fretted that Potemkin had become pro-Prussian. All Joseph could suggest to his Ambassador was to flatter the vanity of the ‘all-powerful being’.⁸

So should Russia risk war with Prussia or come to an agreement with it, which meant making peace with the Turks, betraying the shaky Austrians and probably partitioning Poland, which would be compensated with Ottoman territory? This was the Gordian knot that Potemkin’s long-awaited arrival was meant to cut.

Potemkin had for some time been advising Catherine to soften her obstinate contempt towards Frederick William. The Council expected him to try to persuade her to cut a deal because he knew that Russia could not fight Prussia and Poland as well as Turkey and Sweden. Since it was not yet time to make peace with the Sultan, Potemkin had to avoid war elsewhere. Serenissimus did not want a return to Panin’s Prussian system, so he advised Catherine: ‘Provoke the Prussian king to take whatever from Poland.’⁹ If he lulled the Prussian King into revealing the real greed of his Polish masquerade, the Poles would lose their love for Prussia.¹⁰ ‘Sincerity’, he told his ally Bezborodko,¹¹ ‘is unnecessary in politics.’¹²

—

This visit also saw the end of his friendship with the French envoy, Ségur, who had supported the criticisms of Ligne and Cobenzl during Ochakov. Ségur was hurt: ‘Your friendship for me has cooled a bit, mine won’t ever imitate it. I’m devoted to you for life.’¹³ They had been discussing a Quadruple Alliance with the Bourbons and Habsburgs,¹⁴ but Britain was ever stronger, France ever weaker. ‘I would have advised my Sovereign to ally with Louis the Fat, Louis the Young, Saint Louis, clever Louis XI, wise Louis XII, Louis the Great, even with Louis le Bien-Aimé,’ Serenissimus teased Ségur, ‘but not with Louis the Democrat.’¹⁵

Poor Ségur, playing chess with the Prince, had to endure an entire evening of anti-French comic sketches from his Court ‘fool’ – Russian nobles still had clowns in their households. But he got his own back by bribing the fool to tease Potemkin about Russian military blunders. The Prince overturned the table and threw the chess pieces at the fleeing buffoon, but he saw Ségur’s joke and the evening ended ‘most gaily’.¹⁶

Ségur was about to turn detective, trawling the brothels and taverns of Petersburg on behalf of Potemkin’s American ‘pirate’, Jones. In April, just as Potemkin was about to make Jones ‘the happiest man alive’ with a new job, the American was arrested and accused of paedophile rape. The story has the seedy gleam of a modern sex scandal. Jones appealed to Serenissimus: ‘A bad woman has accused me of violating her daughter!’ Worse, the daughter was said to be nine years old. He beseeched Potemkin: ‘Shall it be said that, in Russia, a wretched woman, who eloped from her husband and family, stole away her daughter, lives here in a house of ill repute and leads a debauched and adulterous life, has found credit enough, on a simple complaint, unsupported by any proof, to affect the honour of a general officer of reputation, who has merited and received the decorations of America, France and this empire?’ Jones, once a Parisian Lothario, admitted to Potemkin, ‘I love women’ and ‘the pleasures that one only obtains from that sex, but to get such things by force, is horrible to me’.¹⁷

Potemkin, deluged with responsibilities and already disliking Jones, did not reply. The capital became a desert to Jones. Detective Ségur was the only friend who supported his old American comrade and resolved to investigate who had framed him. He discovered that Jones had told Potemkin the truth – the accusing mother was a procuress who traded ‘a vile traffic in young girls’. The girl, Katerina Goltzwart, was not nine but twelve, if not fourteen. She sold butter to guests at Jones’s hotel, the London Tavern. In his statement to the chief of police three days after the incident, Jones admitted that the ‘depraved girl’ came several times to his room. He always gave her money. He claimed that he had not taken her virginity but ‘each time she came chez moi, she lent herself with the best grace to all a man could want of her’.

Ségur asked Potemkin to reinstate Jones and not charge him. The latter was possible but not the former. ‘Thanks for what you tried to do for Paul Jones, even though you did not achieve what I wanted,’ Ségur wrote to the Prince. ‘Paul Jones is no more guilty than I, and a man of his rank has never suffered such humiliation, through the accusation of a woman, whose husband certifies she is a pimp and whose daughter solicits the inns.’¹⁸ Thanks to Ségur’s investigations and Potemkin’s tepid help, Jones was not prosecuted and was received by Catherine one last time on 26 June 1789. Who framed Jones? Potemkin was above such vendettas. The English officers hated the American corsair enough to frame him, but Ségur the detective concluded that Prince de Nassau-Siegen was the culprit.

Once back in Paris, Jones wrote a vainglorious account of the Liman and bombarded Potemkin with complaints about the medals he was owed. ‘Time will teach you, my lord,’ he wrote to Serenissimus on 13 July 1790, ‘that I am neither a mountebank nor a swindler but a man loyal and true.’¹⁹

—

On 27 March, the pacific, wine-quaffing Sultan Abdul-Hamid I died. This made things worse, not better, for Russia because Selim III, his eighteen-year-old successor, was an aggressive, intelligent reformer whose determination to fight was buttressed by Moslem fanatics and the ambassadors of Prussia, England and Sweden. Austria and Russia wished to discuss peace with Selim in order to ward off a possible Prussian intervention in the Turkish War – but the augurs were not encouraging. The Austrian Chancellor, Kaunitz, wrote to Potemkin about Selim’s ferocity, alleging that when he had once spotted a Polish Jew on the streets of Istanbul wearing the (wrong) yellow shoes, he had had him beheaded before the unfortunate had a chance to explain that he was a foreigner.²⁰ Peace could be won only on the battlefields in Potemkin’s next campaign: no wonder Catherine was so anxious.

Potemkin and Catherine still flirted with one another. After her birthday reception at Paul’s palace on 12 April, he sweetly boosted her flagging morale by complimenting the ‘mother of her subjects, especially to me’ and the ‘angelic virtues’ of the ‘first-born eagle nestling’, her grandson Alexander.²¹ Before he left he gave her an exquisite present, ‘a so-called bagetelle,’ she wrote to him, ‘which is of rare beauty and, more to the point, as inimitable as you yourself. I marvel at both – it and you. You really are the personification of wit.’²²

On 6 May 1789, having laid plans with Catherine for every eventuality, including wars against Prussia and Poland, the Prince of Taurida left Tsarskoe Selo for the south. The old partners were not to meet again for almost two years.²³

—

Serenissimus raced to the front, where he divided the combined Ukraine and Ekaterinoslav armies – about 60,000 men – into his own main army and four corps. The strategy was to fight round the Black Sea in a south-westerly direction through the Principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia (today’s Moldova and Rumania), taking the fortresses on each river: Dniester, Pruth, then Danube. Potemkin’s army was to cover the Dniester until the Turks were diminished enough to begin fighting up the Danube into modern Bulgaria – to the walls of Constantinople.²⁴

The main Austrian army, under one of their many Scottish officers, Field-Marshal Loudon, was to attack Belgrade (in today’s Serbia), while Prince Frederick Joseph of Saxe-Coburg-Saarlfeld co-operated with the Russians in Wallachia and Moldavia. The most important force, except Potemkin’s own, was Suvorov’s ‘flying corps’, the Third, which was to protect the ‘hinge’ with the Austrians on the Russian extreme left. Suvorov balanced himself across three parallel rivers – the Sereth, Berlad and Pruth – and waited.

The new Grand Vizier Hassan-Pasha Genase commanded an Ottoman army of 100,000: his strategy was to smash the Austrians where the link between the allies was weakest around the rivers Pruth and Sereth, close to Suvorov’s ‘hinge’, while a new armada landed on the Crimea. Ex-Capitan-Pasha Ghazi Hassan, the white-bearded Crocodile of Sea Battles, took to the land in command of a 30,000-strong corps that was to distract Potemkin’s main army while the Vizier broke through. The Turkish manoeuvres were unusually adept. The Russians were vigilant. On 11 May, Potemkin crossed the Bug, massed his forces at Olviopol and then advanced towards the powerful Ottoman fortress of Bender on the Dniester.

In the West, the world was changing. Potemkin was settling into his new headquarters at Olviopol when the Parisian mob stormed the Bastille on 3/14 July. The National Assembly passed the Declaration of the Rights of Man on 15/26 August.²⁵ The Polish Patriots, who were opposed to Russia, were encouraged by the French Revolution – Warsaw enjoyed a febrile fiesta of freedom and hope. Poland demanded that Russia withdraw its troops and magazines. Potemkin carefully monitored Poland, yet he had no choice but to comply.²⁶ He continued to pursue his own Polish policies, vigorously expanding his Black Sea Cossacks to act as an Orthodox spearhead which would raise the pro-Russian eastern area of the Commonwealth when the time came.²⁷

Potemkin ‘flew’ between his headquarters at Olviopol, where Russia, Poland and Turkey met, and Kherson, Ochakov and Elisabethgrad, checking and inspecting his vast front until he had exhausted himself with ‘haemorrhoids and fever’, as he told Catherine, ‘but nothing can stop me except death’.²⁸ She encouraged him by sending one of his rewards for Ochakov, the diamond-studded field-marshal’s baton.

The Grand Vizier stealthily pushed forward, with a corps of 30,000, to strike at Coburg’s Austrians before they could join up with the Russians. At this vital moment, a long and anguished secret letter arrived from a frantic empress. Just as the Turks probed the weakest point of Potemkin’s front, Catherine’s relationship with Mamonov disintegrated in the most humiliating way.

—

Catherine finally understood that Mamonov was not happy: it is hard to blame him. The favourite always complained that life at Court was like surviving in the jungle.²⁹ His role as a companion to an older woman bored him, now that he was accustomed to luxury. Potemkin blocked any political role for him – on his last visit, the Prince had vetoed Mamonov’s request to be a Court vice-chancellor. His sexual duties may have become tedious, even distasteful.

Catherine was turning sixty. She remained publicly majestic, privately simple and playful. ‘I saw her once or twice a week for ten years,’ wrote Masson, ‘every time with renewed admiration.’ Her modesty with her staff was admirable: Countess Golovina recalled how she and her fellow maids-of-honour were happily eating dinner when they noted that the ‘beautiful’ hand of the servant who handed them their plates wore a ‘superb solitaire ring’. They looked up to find it was the Empress herself. She took care with her appearance, keeping her good skin and fine hands. Her now white hair was carefully dressed – but she was exceedingly fat; her legs were often so swollen that they ‘lost their shape’. Her architects, including Cameron at Tsarskoe Selo, and nobles whose houses she visited, gradually installed pentes douces to make it easier for her to enter buildings. Her voice was hoarse, her nose may have become more ‘utterly Greek’ or aquiline, she was cursed with wind and indigestion, and she had probably lost some of her teeth. She was older,^*2 and time exaggerated both her affectionate nature and her emotional neediness.³⁰

The Empress wrote Mamonov a letter generously offering to release him and arrange his happiness by marrying him to one of the richest heiresses in Russia. His reply devastated her. He confessed he had been in love with Princess Daria Shcherbatova, a maid-of-honour, for a ‘year and a half’ and asked to marry her. Catherine gasped and then collapsed at this shameless betrayal of her trust and feelings. Mamonov rushed after her, threw himself at her feet and revealed everything. Catherine’s friend Anna Naryshkina shouted at the favourite. Deeply wounded but always decent to her lovers, Catherine agreed that he could marry Shcherbatova.

At first, she concealed this crisis from Potemkin, probably out of embarrassment and to see if a relationship developed with a new young person close to her. But on 29 June she told her staff she was going to write to Potemkin at Olviopol. By the time it reached him, she had supervised Mamonov’s marriage on 1 July: the groom received 2,250 peasants and 100,000 roubles. Catherine wept at the wedding. ‘I’ve never been a tyrant to anybody,’ she told Potemkin sadly, ‘and I hate compulsion – is it possible you didn’t know me to such an extent, and that the generosity of my character disappeared from your mind, and you considered me a wretched egotist? You would have healed me by telling me the truth.’ She remembered Potemkin’s warnings – ‘Matushka, spit on him’ – which she had ignored. ‘But if you knew about his love, why didn’t you tell me about it frankly?’³¹

Serenissimus replied: ‘When I heard last year he was sending her fruits from the table, I understood it at once but I had no exact evidence to cite in front of you, Matushka. However, I hinted. I felt sorry for you, my foster-mother, and his rudeness and feigned illnesses were even more intolerable.’ Potemkin despised Mamonov’s ‘blend of indifference and egotism…Narcissus to an extreme degree’, advising her to make the ingrate envoy to Switzerland.³² Instead Count and Countess Mamonov were sent to Moscow to stew in their own juices.

‘A sacred place’, Zavadovsky rightly said, ‘is never empty for long.’³³ Catherine had already found Mamonov’s replacement but she wanted to settle herself before telling Potemkin. Even in her first letter, Potemkin’s eye must have been drawn to the reference to a young man she nicknamed ‘le Noiraud’ – ‘Blackie’ – with whom Catherine was getting acquainted. As early as three days after Mamonov’s declaration, Catherine started to see more of Blackie: her valet and secretary both suspected an affair was developing.³⁴ He was a protégé of Anna Naryshkina and Count Nikolai Saltykov, head of the Grand Duke Paul’s household and a critic of Potemkin. As the entire court knew that Mamonov was in love with Shcherbatova, they lost no time in pushing Blackie towards the Empress, because they knew that Potemkin would intervene if they waited. The Prince could not choose Catherine’s lovers but he liked to ensure they were not hostile. There is no doubt that Blackie’s backers intended to undermine Potemkin, knowing that war prevented him from returning as he had after Lanskoy’s death. In June 1789, this ailing Empress, tormented with war and dyspepsia, was far more likely to take what she was offered than at any other time in her life. Perhaps her happiness became more important than her dignity.

—

Blackie was Platon Alexandrovich Zubov, Catherine’s last favourite. He was probably the handsomest of all. Aged twenty-two, Zubov was muscular yet frail, pretty and dark – hence Catherine’s nickname for him – but his expression was brittle, vain, cold. His frequent illnesses suited Catherine’s maternal instincts. He had been at Court since the age of eleven – Catherine had paid for him to study abroad. This popinjay was clever in a shallow and silly way, but he was neither imaginative nor curious, nor able, merely greedy and ambitious. None of this mattered in a favourite. Potemkin helped her run the Empire and fight the war. Zubov was her companion and pupil in her work for the Empire. ‘I’m doing quite well by the state,’ she said disingenuously, ‘by educating young men.’³⁵

Zubov’s ascension to greatness followed a familiar rhythm: the Court noticed the youngster offer his arm to Catherine in the evening. He wore a new uniform with a large feather in the hat. After her card game, he was summoned to accompany Catherine to her apartments and took possession of the favourite’s rooms, where he possibly found a cash present. The day after that, the antechamber of the ‘new idol’ was filled with petitioners.³⁶ On 3 July, Zubov was promoted to colonel in the Horse-Guards and adjutant-general, and significantly he gave a 2,000 rouble watch to his sponsor Naryshkina. Zubov’s patrons already feared Potemkin’s reaction and warned him to show respect to ‘His Highness’.³⁷

Catherine fell in love.³⁸ She was almost swelling with admiration for Blackie. ‘We love this child who is really very interesting,’ she declared, protesting too much. Her joy had the mawkishness of an old woman in the throes of a sexual infatuation with a youth almost forty years younger, as she told Potemkin: ‘I am fat and merry, come back to life like a fly in summer.’³⁹ Ordering some French books for Zubov, she even made a ponderous but unusually risqué joke to her secretary. One of the books was called Lucine without commerce – a letter in which it is demonstrated that a woman can give birth without commerce with a man. Catherine laughed: ‘That’s a revelation, and in ancient times, Mars, Jupiter and the other gods provided the excuse.’⁴⁰ But she nervously waited for the Prince of Taurida’s reaction.

‘Your peace of mind is most necessary,’ he wrote cautiously, ‘and for me it’s dearer than anything,’ but he did not expect any political harm since ‘your mercy is with me.’⁴¹ But Potemkin did not pass judgement on her choice of Zubov. Catherine could not quite bring herself to mention the youngster by name to Potemkin, but she could not resist raving about his prettiness: ‘Blackie has very beautiful eyes.’ She restated their secret partnership: ‘You are right when you write that you have my mercy and there are no circumstances to harm you…Your villains will have no success with me.’ In return, she begged for Potemkin’s approval of her new love: ‘Comfort me, caress us.’⁴²

Soon she was making Zubov write flattering letters to her consort, to recreate their ‘family’: ‘Here I enclose for you an admiring letter from the most innocent soul…who has a good heart and a sweet way of thinking.’ She added hopefully: ‘Think what a fatal situation it would be for my health without this man. Adieu mon ami, be nice to us.’⁴³ When he was ‘nice’, the Empress actually thanked him for his approval: ‘It is a great satisfaction for me, my friend, that you are pleased with me and little Blackie…I hope he doesn’t become spoilt.’⁴⁴ That was too much to hope. Zubov spent hours in front of the mirror having his hair curled. He arrogantly let his pet monkey pull the wigs off venerable petitioners. ‘Potemkin was indebted to his elevation almost solely to himself,’ recalled Masson, who knew both men. ‘Zubov owed his to the infirmities of Catherine.’⁴⁵

Zubov’s rise is always described as a political disaster for Potemkin, but its significance has been exaggerated by hindsight. The Prince’s first interest was for Catherine to find a favourite to leave him to run the Empire and to make her happy. He was not sorry to see the end of Mamonov, originally his choice, because he had become disrespectful to Catherine. When he was in Petersburg in February, it was rumoured he was pushing his own candidate⁴⁶ – and one source suggests it was Zubov’s younger brother Valerian, which would mean that, whoever their friends were, the Zubovs were not regarded as inherently hostile. Indeed Potemkin liked the brave and able Valerian and promoted him wherever possible.⁴⁷ Damas, who was with Potemkin, did not notice any particular antipathy towards the Zubovs.⁴⁸ Potemkin and Zubov now began the usual correspondence – young favourite paying court to older consort. Every favourite dreamed of supplanting the Prince. The danger was now greater because of Catherine’s age. But Potemkin’s prestige and power increased throughout the war. So Zubov was politically inconvenient – but no more than a pinprick.

—

Serenissimus granted his approval slowly: ‘My dear Matushka, how can I not sincerely love the man who makes you happy? You may be sure I will have a frank friendship with him because of his attachment to you.’ But he had more exciting news: victory.⁴⁹

The Ottoman corps of 30,000 suddenly jabbed towards Fokshany in Moldavia, where 12,000 Austrians guarded Potemkin’s right flank. Coburg, the stodgy Austrian commander, was in no doubt of his own limitations and called for Russian help. Potemkin had specifically ordered Suvorov to prevent any concentration of the Turks or attempt to divide the allied forces. As soon as Suvorov received Coburg’s message, he informed Potemkin and force-marched his 5,000 Russians to intervene so aggressively that the Turkish commander presumed they must be the vanguard of an army. On 20/21 July 1789 at the Battle of Fokshany, Suvorov’s tiny but disciplined corps, assisted by the Austrians, routed the Turks, killing over 1,500 while losing only a few hundred men. The Turks fled towards Bucharest.⁵⁰

The Grand Vizier’s huge army was on the move again. Suvorov hurried back to his post. Potemkin crossed the Dniester on 12 August and turned southwards to set up his headquarters at Dubossary. All eyes were on the Grand Vizier: Potemkin kept his army between Dubossary and Kishnev, and rushed over to Ochakov and Kherson to prepare them for the planned Turkish attack from the sea.

At his Headquarters at Dubossary, Serenissimus lived sumptuously in a residence ‘as splendid as the Vizier’s’. William Gould, the emperor of landscapers, created an instant English garden on the spot.⁵¹ Sarti’s orchestra played all day. Many generals have travelled with mistresses and servants, but only Potemkin went to war with an army of gardeners and violinists. It seemed as if he planned to spend the rest of his life there.⁵²

The Vizier correctly identified the ‘hinge’ between the allied armies as Potemkin’s weakest point, so he launched two thrusts. The old Crocodile, Ghazi Hassan, sortied out of Ismail with a corps of 30,000, and lunged across the Pruth to draw Potemkin’s main army. But Potemkin kept his army in place and despatched Repnin to parry the thrust and if possible take mighty Ismail: he pursued the now land-lubbing Algerian sailor and his corps all the way back to the fortress. Once there, Repnin wasted time and did nothing.

On 1 September, Potemkin gave specific orders to Suvorov about the Vizier’s army. ‘If the enemy appears anywhere in your direction, attack him, having asked for God’s mercy, and don’t let him concentrate.’⁵³ Just after getting Potemkin’s orders on 4 September, Suvorov received a second call for help from Coburg. The Grand Vizier was approaching Fokshany, bearing down on Coburg’s 18,000 with an army of 90,000. Suvorov replied to Coburg: ‘Coming. Suvorov’.⁵⁴ He just had time to send off a courier to the Prince before he embarked his 7,000 men on a Spartan forced-march of 100 versts, across flooded rivers, which he covered in two and a half days.

Potemkin fretted that he would not make it in time.⁵⁵ On the same day that he ordered Suvorov to be ready, he devised a complex amphibious operation to attack a vital Ottoman fortified port called Hadjibey, the future Odessa. The land forces advanced from Ochakov supported by a flotilla made up of Zaporogian chaiki and other oar-propelled gunboats, commanded by that talented Neapolitan adventurer José de Ribas, whose rear was covered by the ships-of-the-line of the Black Sea Fleet. Potemkin himself led his army forward towards Kaushany in case Repnin or Suvorov required his assistance. These sophisticated manoeuvres belie Potemkin’s unjust reputation as a military incompetent.⁵⁶

Suvorov found Coburg cowed before the Grand Vizier’s encampment on the River Rymnik. The Turks outnumbered the allies four to one. On 8 September, Potemkin ordered Suvorov to ‘assist Prince Coburg in attacking the enemy but not in defence ‘. On 11 September, the allies attacked. The Turks fought with their old fanaticism, throwing wave after wave of Janissaries and Spahis against Suvorov’s squares. They just held for two hours. Then the allied troops advanced, shouting ‘Catherine’ and ‘Joseph’. Potemkin’s new light forces – his Jaegers, mobile sharpshooters, and cavalry, Carabiniers and Cossacks – proved themselves as adept and swift as Ottoman forces. The Turks were annihilated, 15,000 died on the ‘cruel battlefield’.⁵⁷ The Grand Vizier, as Potemkin boasted to his erstwhile friend Ligne, ‘fled like a boy’.⁵⁸

The elated Serenissimus lavished praise on Suvorov: ‘I embrace and kiss you sincerely, my dear friend, your indefatigable zeal makes me wish I could have you everywhere!’ Suvorov embraced him back: ‘I’m kissing your precious letter and remain in deepest respect, Serenissimus, Merciful Lord!’ Their exultation was based on mutual respect: the strategy was Potemkin’s; the tactics belonged to Suvorov’s genius. Potemkin followed up Suvorov’s triumph on land and sea. He took Kaushany on 13 September. Next day, Ribas captured Hadjibey. The Prince ordered the Sebastopol fleet out to sea to attack the Ottomans.

He then advanced on the two most potent Ottoman fortresses on the Dniester. Wielding the memory of the bloodbath of Ochakov as his weapon, Potemkin hoped to get them ‘cheap’. First there were the towering ramparts of Akkerman (Belgrade-on-Dniester) that commanded the mouth of the river. When the Turkish fleet headed back to Istanbul, Potemkin ordered the taking of Akkerman. It surrendered on 30 September. The Prince rushed down to inspect it and returned through Kishnev, struggling to arrange the provisioning of the armies as Poland closed its doors.^*3

Serenissimus turned to the greatest prize on the Dniester: the famous fortress of Bender, built high on an escarpment above the river in a modern fortified square with four formidable towers and a 20,000-strong garrison, a small army.⁵⁹ Potemkin moved to besiege the fortress, but he also opened negotiations. On 4 November, he got his wish. He later enjoyed telling Catherine the ‘Miraculous Case’ of Bender’s eight generals, who dreamed that they had either to surrender or perish. They went to the Pasha and told him the story. The dreaming Turks were obviously looking for a somnolent excuse to avoid a Russian assault, but this life-saving parable amused Potemkin.⁶⁰ Bender surrendered; Potemkin took 300 cannons – in return for letting the garrison march out. The surrender document, now in Potemkin’s papers,⁶¹ catches the elaborate formality of the stultified Ottoman bureaucracy, but it also referred to the Prince in terms not given to the Grand Vizier but only to the Sultan himself.^*4

Bender was Potemkin’s ideal conquest, not costing Russia a single man. Success was infectious: Joseph congratulated Potemkin, but in an unpublished letter to Ligne he grasped Potemkin’s true achievement: ‘It’s an art to besiege forts and take them by force…but to make yourself master in this way is the greatest art of all.’ It would be Potemkin’s ‘most beautiful glory’.⁶²

The Grand Vizier would not have agreed: after Rymnik, the Sultan had him killed in Shumla, while the Seraskier of Bender was beheaded in Istanbul: four months later, the British Ambassador noticed his head still rotting outside the Seraglio.⁶³

‘Well Matushka, did it come off according to my plan?’,⁶⁴ the euphoric Potemkin asked Catherine. Triumph made him playful, so he wrote her this ditty:

Nous avons pris neuf lançons

Sans perdre un garçon

Et Bender avec trois Pashas

Sans perdre un chat.^65*5

Serenissimus’ reaction to Suvorov’s victory at Rymnik could not have been more generous: ‘Really Matushka, he deserves your favour and the fighting was vital, I am thinking what to give him…Peter the Great granted Counts for nothing. How about giving him [a title] with the surname of “Rymniksky”?’⁶⁶ Potemkin was proud that Russians had rescued Austrians, who had been on the verge of running away. He asked her to ‘show grace to Suvorov’ and ‘shame the sponger-generals who aren’t worth their salaries’.⁶⁷

Catherine got the message. She gave Suvorov the title and a diamond-studded sword engraved ‘Conqueror of the Grand Vizier’. Potemkin thanked her for Suvorov’s reward (Joseph made him an imperial count too) and gave every soldier a rouble.⁶⁸ When he sent all Suvorov’s rewards – a ‘whole wagon’⁶⁹ of diamonds and the Cross of St George 1st degree – he told the new Count, ‘You would of course obtain equal glory and victories at any time; but not every chief would inform you about the rewards with pleasure as great as mine.’ Once again, these two brilliant and overly emotional eccentrics outdid each other. ‘I can hardly see the daylight for tears of joy!’, declared Suvorov-Rymniksky. ‘Long live Prince Grigory Alexandrovich…He is an honest man, a kind man, a great man!’⁷⁰

Potemkin was the hero of the hour, going from ‘conquest to conquest’, as Catherine told Ligne: he had now taken the entire Dniester and Bug and the land between them.⁷¹ ‘Te Deums’ were sung in Petersburg; 101 cannons were fired. If power is an aphrodisiac, victory is love itself: Catherine wrote to him as if they were almost lovers again. ‘Your present campaign is brilliant! I love you very, very much.’⁷² But they were still discussing how to react to Prussian pressure to undermine Russian gains against the Turks. She told him she was taking his advice about the Prussians: ‘We are caressing the Prussians,’ though it was not easy to tolerate their ‘abuse’. She told him that Zubov had wanted to see Potemkin’s art collection and apartments in the house on Millionaya, so Catherine took him on a tour and noticed that the décor was a bit shabby for a conquering hero. She had it redecorated, lavishing white damask on the bedroom and hanging his collection for him. She signed off: ‘I love you with all my heart.’⁷³

Meanwhile the Austrians, now in the sure hands of Loudon, had taken the Balkan Belgrade on 19 September, while Bucharest fell to Coburg. The ‘Te Deums’ for the two Belgrades (the other was Akkerman – Belgrade-on-Dniester) were sung in Petersburg simultaneously.

Victory accelerated a cult of the Prince as Mars. Catherine had cast a medallion of his profile to commemorate Ochakov. The sculptor, Shubin, was carving a bust.⁷⁴ So she lectured Potemkin on stardom like the sensible mother of a famous son. ‘Don’t be too bumptious,’ she wrote, ‘but show the world the greatness of your soul.’⁷⁵ Potemkin understood that ‘everything good is given to me by God’, but he was a little hurt. He threatened to retire to a bishopric.⁷⁶ Catherine replied: ‘A monastery will never be the home of a man whose name is trumpeted across Asia and Europe – it’s too small for him.’⁷⁷

In Vienna, where even Joseph was now popular, the Prince’s name was cheered in the theatres and the women wore belts and rings emblazoned ‘Potemkin’. He could not resist telling Catherine all about it and sent her Princess Esterhazy’s ‘Potemkin’ ring. After her lecture, he was careful not to boast too much to the Empress, who was so like him in her love of glory: ‘Since I am yours, then my successes too belong directly to you.’⁷⁸

The ailing Kaiser urged Potemkin to make a peace rendered more desirable by ‘the bad intentions of our joint enemies’ – the Prussians.⁷⁹ Surely now the Turks would be ready. Potemkin set up Court in Jassy, the Moldavian capital, to winter like a sultan, revel in his mistresses, build his towns, create his regiments – and negotiate peace with the Sublime Porte. Now he was emperor of all he surveyed. He lived in Turkish palaces; his Court was ever more exotic – Kabardian princes and Persian ambassadors; his girls, whether Russian or not, behaved like odalisques. The heat, the distances, the years away from Petersburg, changed the man. His enemies began to compare him to the semi-mythical seventh-century bc Assyrian tyrant, famed for his capricious extravagance, voluptuous decadence and martial victories – Sardanapalus.

Skip Notes

*1 Suvorov, according to the histories, was supposed to have complained to Catherine that jealous Potemkin was excluding him from senior commands. The truth was the opposite.

*2 Her courtiers were old too: Ivan Chernyshev left such a disgusting stench in the Empress’s apartments that the floor had to be doused in lavender water every time he left.

*3 Akkerman’s massive fortress still stands.

*4 ’To his Highness Monseigneur Prince Potemkin: Representation of Ahmet Pasha Huhafiz of Bender. In rendering with deep respect the honours due to Your Highness, very generous, very firm, very gracious, ornamented of an elevated genius to devise and execute very great enterprises, whose authority is accompanied by the most dazzling dignity, Principal Minister, acclaimed with the very highest precedence and first representative of Her Imperial Highness, the Padishah of Russia, we represent…the pity for children and women brings us to accept…the proposition.’

*5 ‘We’ve taken nine launches, Without losing a boy, And Bender with three Pashas, Without losing a cat.’