Catherine the Great & Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair

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THE DELICIOUS AND THE CRUEL: SARDANAPALUS

Now dreaming I a Sultan am

I terrify the world by glances;

Gavrila Derzhavin, ‘Ode to Princess Felitsa’

The despotism of vice

The weakness and the wickedness of luxury

The negligence – the apathy – the evils

Of sensual sloth produce ten thousand tyrants.

Lord Byron, Sardanapalus

‘Be very careful with the Prince,’ whispered Princess Ekaterina Dolgorukaya to her friend Countess Varvara Golovina when she arrived at the court of Serenissimus in Jassy, the capital of Moldavia. ‘He is like a Sovereign here.’¹ Potemkin’s chosen capital, Jassy (now Iaşi in Rumania), could have been made for him. It was surrounded by three empires – Ottoman, Russian and Habsburg – prayed in three religions – Moslem, Orthodox and Jewish – and spoke three languages – Greek, Turkish and French. Its marketplaces, dominated by Jews, Greeks and Italians, offered ‘all the merchandise of the Orient in abundance’.² Its sophistication, which consoled Ligne in 1788 for the miseries of Ochakov, had ‘enough of the oriental to have the piquant of Asia and enough civilization to add to it some European graces’.³

The rulers, the Hospodars or Princes, of Wallachia and Moldavia, the two Danubian Principalities, were Greeks from the Phanar District of Constantinople and some of them were descended from Byzantine emperors. These wealthy Phanariots bought their temporary thrones from the Ottoman Sultan. Their Orthodox–Islamic, Byzantine–Ottoman coronations in Istanbul were perhaps the only example of rulers crowned in a country which they did not rule.⁴ Once in Jassy or Bucharest, the hydrid Greek-Turkish Hospodars taxed their temporary realms to fill their coffers to cover the exorbitant price they had paid the Sultan for their thrones: ‘a prince leaves Constantinople with three million piastres of debt and after four years…returns with six million’.⁵ They lived like magnificent parodies of Ottoman–Byzantine emperors, surrounded by Phanariot courtiers – their prime minister was called the Grand Postelnik, their police chief the Grand Spatar and their chief justice the Grand Hetman. Often they might rule in both places, or the same one, several times.

The aristocracy, the boyars, were Rumanians but were overlaid with rich Phanariot dynasties, some of whom were now based in Jassy, where they built their fine neo-Classical palaces. These Greek boyars, who looked like ‘monkeys on a horse covered in rubies’, lived in Turkish robes and pantaloons, grew their beards, shaved their heads and sported bonnets encircled with fur and rings of pearls. They waved flywhisks, nibbled sherbet and read Voltaire. Their women languished on divans, wearing diamond-infested turbans and short transparent petticoats, their necks and arms covered in gauze with pearls and coins sewn into them. They dangled fan-like chaplets made of diamonds, pearls, coral, lapis lazuli and rare wood. Connoisseurs of femininity like Ligne were fascinated by these ‘pretty, tender – and apathetic’ princesses whose only flaw was the protuberant belly regarded as a sign of beauty. Ligne claimed that their morals made the Paris of Les Liaisons Dangereuses appear monastic and that the Hospodar let his friends ‘visit’ the women in his wife’s household – but only after a medical check. ‘People took each other and left each other, there was neither jealousy nor bad temper.’⁶

It was not merely the cosmopolitanism and luxury that suited Potemkin, but also the politics. The throne of Moldavia was highly lucrative but extremely dangerous: heads were lost as quickly as fortunes were gained. Ligne overheard the ladies at court sighing, ‘here my father was massacred by order of the Porte and here my sister by order of the Hospodar’. This was the battleground of both the Russo-Turkish wars, which placed the Hospodars in an impossible position. They trod a political tightrope between Orthodox God and Moslem Sultan. They had to play a complicated double game. The First Russo-Turkish War had won Russia rights to appoint consuls in these Principalities. One of the major causes of the outbreak of war in 1787 was the Ottoman overthrow of the Moldavian Hospodar, Alexander Mavrocordato, who was given sanctuary in Russia and sent Potemkin books and requests for money, while writing that ‘philosophy alone sustains me’. The impermanence of these Hospodars, their Greek race and the Orthodoxy of the people attracted Potemkin.⁷

—

Serenissimus now ruled from Jassy as if he had, at last, found his kingdom. Dacia had been destined for him since the Greek Project of 1782. The rumours of Potemkin’s potential crowns became ever more colourful – a Livonian duchy, a Greek kingdom of Morea and even a most Potemkinian project to buy two Italian islands, Lampedusa and Linosa, from the Kingdom of Naples and found an order of knighthood – but a variation on Dacia was much more likely.⁸ Potemkin ‘regarded Moldavia as a domain which belonged to him’.⁹

While the Hospodars of Moldavia and Wallachia corresponded with Potemkin from the Turkish camp, begging for peace,¹⁰ the Prince himself adopted their resplendence, while ruling through a Divan of boyars, under his dynamic Georgian negotiator¹¹ Sergei Lazhkarev.^*1 The Turks and Westerners knew that Potemkin wanted Moldavia; he coaxed and charmed the boyars, who¹² themselves were almost offering him the throne.¹³ Their letters at this time thanked him for delivering them ‘from the tyranny of the Turks. We beg Your Highness not to lose from your vigilant vision the little interests of our country which will always have Your Highness as Liberator.’ Prince Cantacuzino, scion of Byzantine emperors, heralded this ‘epoch of felicity – we dare to run to the wise lights of Your Highness, hero of the century’.¹⁴

Serenissimus now took the modern step of becoming a press baron. He created, edited and published his own newspaper called Le Courrier de Moldavie. Printed by his own movable printing press, Le Courrier was a tabloid emblazoned with the Moldavian crest that reported international and local news. The articles were moderately liberal, rabidly against the French Revolution and gently supportive of an independent Rumanian realm under Potemkin.¹⁵ Some believed he even planned to create a Moldavian army by detaching crack Russian regiments.¹⁶ His nephew General Samoilov, who was often with him at this time, states that he would only ever make peace if Moldavia – Dacia^*2 – was granted independence.¹⁷

—

The Prince was never one to allow war, winter or the small matter of a new kingdom to interfere with his pleasures. ‘Mister monk, no monkhood,’ Catherine teased him in an imperial understatement.¹⁸ He resided in the palaces of either Princes Cantacuzino or Ghika and spent hot days in Czerdak in the countryside nearby.’^*3 He was joined by ten mechanics from Tula, twelve carriages of books, twenty jewellers, twenty-three female carpet-makers, 100 embroiderers,¹⁹ a mime troupe, his 200 hornplayers (to play Sarti’s ‘Te Deum’ to Ochakov, accompanied by the firing of cannons, an idea borrowed by Tchaikovsky for his 1812 Overture), a 300-voice choir, a corps de ballet,²⁰ gardener Gould, architect Starov,²¹ nephews, nieces and his chancellor Popov.

Only his English cooks refused to go,²² so he had to make do with English gardens and French meals – probably a much better idea anyway. But he did receive hampers²³ of English delicacies as a consolation. One such consignment – the bill is in his archives – contained smoked salmon, dried salmon, marinated salmon, Dutch herrings, Livonian anchovies, smoked souls, lampreys, eels, two barrels of apples, two bottles of mussels, two bottles of tinto, two bottles of Lacrima Christi, two bottles of champagne and six of Hermiatate, three bottles of red burgundy, three of white burgundy, three bottles of Jamaican rum – and more.

‘Parties, balls, theatres, ballets were organized ceaselessly.’ When the Prince heard that an officer 700 versts away played the violin well, he sent a courier for the fiddler; when he arrived, he listened with pleasure, gave him a gift and sent him straight back again.²⁴ This reflected Potemkin’s pre-Napoleonic view that an army marches on its merriment, not its stomach. ‘A sad army can never undertake the toughest assignments,’ he wrote, ‘and it’s more likely to suffer illness.’²⁵

The belles of Petersburg trooped down to entertain him and deceive their husbands. Praskovia Potemkina of the flawless skin and perfect face was now firmly esconced as ‘favourite sultana’,²⁶ and supplicants waited in her antechambers to ask for favours.²⁷ Praskovia and the Prince enjoyed a deep love affair in Jassy. ‘You are my pleasure and my priceless treasure, you are God’s gift to me,’ he wrote, adding that his love expressed itself to her, not in mad passion or drunkenness, but in ‘never ending tenderness’. Without her, ‘I’m only half of myself…you are the soul of my soul, my Parashinka.’ He always enjoyed choosing dresses for his nieces and designing habits for monks, and Praskovia must have looked fetching in uniforms because he wrote to her: ‘Do you know, beautiful sweetheart, you are a Cuirassier in my regiment. The helmet suits you perfectly, everything fits you. Today I shall put a bishop’s hat on you…Do me a favour, my unrivalled beauty, make up a dress of calico and purple satin…’. He told her which jewels to wear – which to string, which to mount in a diadem. He even designed their imaginary house of love, which reveals the touching originality of this strange, sensitive man: ‘I drew you patterns, I brought you diamonds, now I am drawing you a small house and garden in the oriental taste with all the magical luxuries…’. There would be a big hall, the sound of a fountain. Upstairs, there would be a lighted gallery with ‘pictures of Hero and Leander, Apollo and Daphne…the most ardent poems of Sappho’ and an erotic painting of Praskovia herself ‘in a white short dress, girded by a delicate lilac belt, open at the breast, hair loose and unpowdered, the chemise held by a ruby…’. The bed would be surrounded by ‘curtains as thin as smoke’ in a room with aquamarine glass. ‘But the place where luxury will exhaust itself is the bath’, which would be surrounded by mirrors and filled with water, scented with rose, lilac, jasmine, and orange’. Serenissimus was ‘cheerful when you’re cheerful, I’m full up when you’re full up’.²⁸

—

When the Prince was in love, he would do anything for his mistress. In March and April 1790, he even ordered Faleev to rename two of his ships after Praskovia.²⁹ ‘The jewels, diamonds and all the treasures of the four parts of the world were used to decorate her charms.’ When she wanted jewels, Colonel Bauer galloped off to Paris; when she talked about perfumes, Major Lamsdorf headed for Florence and returned with two fragrant carriages of it.³⁰

Here is his Parisian shopping-list for one of those legendary missions, probably for Praskovia and other ‘sultanas’, in July 1790, second year of the French Revolution. The courier was Lamsdorf. When he arrived in Paris, the Russian envoy Baron Simolin was expected to drop everything. ‘I have not ceased to occupy myself with him in the execution of the commissions Your Highness has wished to be discharged in Paris and to assist him with my advice and that of a lady of my acquaintance.’ It sounds as if Simolin recruited his mistress to make sure he was buying the right stockings. Indeed, ‘we have taken care to execute all things in the latest fashion’. Without the lady and Lamsdorf, Simolin admitted he could not have bought the following:

– fashion pieces [ballgowns] made by Mademoiselles Gosfit, Madame de Modes

14,333 livres

– fashion pieces [ballgowns] made by Henry Desreyeux

9,488 livres

– a piece of muslin from the Indies, embroidery from India in silk and silver (Henry Desreyeux)

2400 livres

– [fashion from] Madame Plumesfeur

724 lives

– seller of Rubies

1224 livres

– madame the florist

826 livres

– couturier for 4 corsets

255 livres

– shoemakers for 72 pairs of shoes [ball slippers]

446 livres

– embroiderer for 12 pairs of shoes [ball slippers]

288 livres

– a pair of ear muffs

132 livres

– the stocking maker for 6 dozen pairs

648 livres

– rubies

248 livres

– madame the gauze seller

858 livres

– the wrapping-up man Bocqueux

1200 livres.³¹

One suspects that not all of these were for the Prince himself. As soon as all the craftsmen and seamstresses had finished their work, Lamsdorf galloped them back to Jassy. These frivolous missions were also useful: the couriers who brought delicacies and ballgowns from Paris bore Potemkin’s vast correspondence – twenty to thirty letters a day – and collected intelligence and replies; for example, Stackelberg in Warsaw reported that Potemkin’s fastest courier had delivered an urgent despatch on his way to the West.³² This was a diplomatic, espionage, ballgown and catering service, all in one.

Serenissimus was certainly extravagant. That trip cost 44,000 livres for fourteen items, approximately £2,000, at a time when an English gentleman could live comfortably on £300 a year. It was more than the annual salary of a Russian field-marshal (7,000 roubles).³³ These missions were quite frequent. Potemkin even sent Grimm regular shopping-lists of female clothing, maps or musical instruments which Catherine’s philosophe dutifully provided.³⁴ However, Potemkin’s notorious inefficiency in paying debts drove Simolin to distraction. On 25 December 1788, he was even forced to appeal to Bezborodko for help in getting the Prince to pay for an earlier expedition that had cost another 32,000 livres.³⁵

Potemkin’s lifestyle had been royal if not imperial since 1774, and he possessed ‘a fortune greater than certain kings’.³⁶ It is impossible to work out the exact sums: even on his death, his estate was unquantifiable. The Prince was ‘prodigiously rich and not worth a farthing’, wrote Ligne, ‘preferring prodigality and giving, to regularity in paying’.³⁷ This was almost literally true, because he was essentially a member of the imperial household – so that, the Treasury was his private bank. ‘It is true Potemkin had immediate access to the State Treasury,’ claimed Masson, ‘but he also spent a great deal for the State and showed himself as much a Grand Prince of Russia as a favourite of Catherine.’³⁸ Pushkin later recorded the story that, when a Treasury clerk queried Potemkin’s latest request for money, he sent back a note that read: ‘Pay up or fuck off!’ It was said that Catherine ordered the Treasury to regard his requests like her own, but this was not quite so.³⁹

There is no record of Catherine ever turning down any of Potemkin’s requests for money, but he still had to apply for the money, even though he knew it would be granted. During the building of his towns and fleets and during the war, massive amounts of money poured through his hands, but the image of his wanton waste of public funds is not borne out by the archives, which show how the money was assigned by Catherine, via Procurator-General Viazemsky, and then distributed by Potemkin, via his offices and officials like Faleev, Zeitlin or Popov, down to the actual regiments and fleets. Much of it never actually reached the Prince himself – though he was too grand to concern himself with smaller sums and Viazemsky complained to the Empress that he had neglected to account for all of it. This touches on the question of his financial probity. In his case, it was a meaningless concept: Serenissimus used his own money for the state and the Treasury for his personal uses and saw little difference between the two.⁴⁰

The Prince was hungry for money and he loved spending it – but it did not interest him for its own sake. He had to spend a fortune to maintain himself in the style of imperial consort when even senior courtiers strained themselves to keep up appearances. Furthermore, the delays in payments by the Treasury meant that, in order to push through his projects and raise his armies, he had to spend his own money. His avidity for riches was part of his insurance policy against the accession of Paul, one reason he invested in Polish land.

Once he was showing some officers round one of his palaces when they came upon a gold bath. The officers raved about it so much that Potemkin shouted: ‘If you can shit enough to fill it up, you can keep it.’ When a flatterer marvelled at the resplendence of some ball he gave, the Prince snapped: ‘What, sir, do you presume to know the depth of my purse?’ Potemkin himself never had any idea of its depth. He just knew there was almost no bottom: his fortune was variously estimated at nine, sixteen, forty and fifty million roubles. But given that during war and peace the whole military and southern development budgets of the Empire passed through his Chancellery, these figures are irrelevant and his debts enormous.⁴¹

Potemkin borrowed prodigiously and he tormented his Scottish banker, Richard Sutherland, who became rich on Potemkin’s business and eventually rose to be Catherine’s Court banker and a baron.^*4 Bankers and merchants circled Potemkin like vultures, competing to offer goods and loans.⁴² Sutherland worked hardest, and suffered most, to win Potemkin’s business. On 13 September 1783, he begged Potemkin ‘humbly to condescend to give orders to make payment to me of the rising claims which I have the honour to send him coming to 167,029 roubles and sixty kopecks’, mostly spent on state business, settling immigrants. The anguished banker tried to explain, ‘again I take the liberty of representing to Your Highness that my credit depends, and depends a lot, on the return of this money’.⁴³ Sutherland was evidently desperate, because he owed other bankers in Warsaw and beyond, and it often seems as if Potemkin was about to set off a chain-reaction banking crash across Europe – but it is worth noting that most of this money was not spent on baubles. Sutherland was the means by which Potemkin financed the settlement of immigrants, the procurement of timber and the building of his towns, the best example of how his personal and imperial spending were entangled.

By 1788, the Prince owed Sutherland 500,000 roubles. Three weeks later, Sutherland swore that things had reached such a ‘critical and worrying point’ as to force him to ‘come importuning to my first benefactor…to obtain…the sum without which I would not know how to honour my affairs’. It was Potemkin himself who scrawled in French on the letter: ‘Tell him he’ll receive 200,000 roubles.’

Serenissimus was far from miserly – on the contrary, he was wildly generous. Saving was foreign to his nature. Only his death gave a snapshot of his fortune and even then it hardly enlightens us. Like the Empress herself, he was part of the state, and the Empire was his fortune.⁴⁴

—

A country’s enemies multiply in proportion to its successes. Russia’s enemies, aroused by Potemkin’s dangerous victories, did all they could to encourage the Ottomans to keep fighting. Meanwhile Russia’s military activity became paralysed by the prospect of war against Prussia, Poland and England as well as Turkey and Sweden. So Potemkin spent the winter of 1789 and much of the following year trying to negotiate with the Sublime Porte. Initially, the Turks seemed sincere in their wish to make peace. Sultan Selim freed the Russian Ambassador from the Seven Towers and appointed ‘the famous Algerian knight,’⁴⁵ ex-Capitan-Pasha Ghazi Hassan-Pasha, as grand vizier, to talk peace.

However, Prussian diplomacy aimed to undermine Russia and fulfil the so-called Hertzberg Plan, named after the Prussian Chancellor, which was designed to secure the Polish towns of Thorn and Danzig for Prussia in return for Austria ceding Galicia to Poland and Russia returning the Danubian Principalities to Turkey. This required a coalition against Russia, so the Sultan was offered an alliance to secure the return of the Crimea. Sweden was offered Livonia with Riga. Russia’s ally Austria was threatened with Prussian invasion. Russia itself was forced to withdraw from Poland, leaving the field to Prussia, which found itself in the ironic situation of having the greatest influence in a country it wanted to carve up. It was only now, when Poland was offered constitutional reform and an alliance in return for the cession of Thorn and Danzig, that the Poles realized that they had been deceived: Prussia was not just as carnivorous as Russia but more so. Yet they were forced to accept the Prussian advances and turned on the Russians. England backed Prussia in demanding that Russia and Austria make peace with the Porte on the basis of the status quo ante bellum. There was no question of any Russian military operations: Potemkin had to move a corps to cover a possible attack by Poland and Prussia. By 24 December 1789, Catherine was telling her secretary: ‘Now we are in a crisis: either peace or a triple war with Prussia.’⁴⁶

Potemkin’s agent for the peace negotiations was a truly Levantine operator and diplomatic entrepreneur named Ivan Stepanovich Barozzi, a Greek quadruple agent for Russia, Turkey, Austria and Prussia simultaneously. After meanderingly mysterious Potemkinian conversations in Jassy, where he was shocked by the Prince’s lecherous behaviour, Barozzi headed for the Vizier’s headquarters, Shumla with Potemkin’s terms.⁴⁷ The Dniester would be the new border. Akkerman and Bender would be razed. The Principalities would be ‘independent’.^*5

Barozzi reached Shumla on 26 December 1789. The Prince’s accounts show the way such discussions were lubricated with a shower of baksheesh. At least sixteen rings, gold clocks, chains, snuff-boxes, were designated for different Turkish officials, specified as ‘Ring with blue ruby and diamond for first secretary of Turkish ambassador Ovni Esfiru’, while Barozzi himself got a ‘ring with a big emerald’ either to present or to wear for his discussions with the Vizier.⁴⁸ Potemkin even offered to build a mosque in Moscow. However charming the brilliants, Potemkin’s terms did not please the ‘Algerine renegado’. Serenissimus, unimpressed with the counter-proposals, gave his new terms on 27 February 1790. ‘My propositions are short,’ he said, ‘there is no need for a great deal of talk.’ There would be no armistice – ‘more the wish to gain time than make peace – from what I know of Turkish artifice’. Then came a Potemkinian phrase: ‘The Turks like to take a chariot to chase a hare.’ The Prince preferred to be defeated rather than tricked.⁴⁹

Potemkin was right not to commit himself completely to the Barozzi talks. The Prince knew from the Austrians and his Istanbul spies that Sultan Selim regarded the Grand Vizier’s peace talks as a secondary, parallel policy to his negotiations with the Prussian envoy, Dietz, in Constantinople. If the Turks could get help from Prussia and Poland, they could go on fighting. By the time Potemkin replied, the Sultan had already signed an aggressive alliance with Prussia on 20 January 1790 which committed Frederick William to help reconquer the Crimea and go to war against Catherine.

As this noose tightened around Russia, ‘the health of the Emperor is the severest of all the storms which menace the political sky’, Potemkin told Kaunitz that January. Joseph II was stricken, physically with tuberculosis, and politically with revolts across his Empire from Hungary to the Netherlands. He seemed to be recovering when he had to undergo an agonizing operation on an anal abcess that sapped his strength. The death scene was tragic. ‘Has anyone wept over me?’, he asked. He was told that Ligne was in tears. ‘I did not think I was deserving of such affection,’ replied the Emperor. He suggested his own epitaph: ‘Here lies a prince whose intentions were pure but who had the misfortune to see all his plans collapse.’ Catherine was ‘sorry for my ally’, who was ‘dying, hated by everybody.’⁵⁰ When Joseph died on 9/20 February 1790, Kaunitz supposedly muttered: ‘That was very good of him.’⁵¹

It may have been good for the Habsburg Monarchy but it was another blow to Russia. On 18/29 March, Prussia tightened its ring once again and signed a military alliance with Poland. Frederick William moved 40,000 men towards Livonia in the north and another 40,000 in Silesia, mustering a 100,000-man reserve. The new Habsburg monarch, Leopold, King of Hungary (until he was elected emperor), was alarmed and immediately wrote to Potemkin: ‘You have lost a friend in my brother His Majesty the Emperor, you have found another in me who honours more than anyone your genius and nobility.’ Serenissimus and Leopold co-ordinated their defence of Galicia against the Poles – but the King of Hungary’s true concern was to prevent the Prussian invasion ‘in concert with Poland’ and save the Habsburg Monarchy. He begged Potemkin to make a peace that had already slipped away.⁵²

In the midst of these upheavals, the Prince learned that an admirable Englishman was dying of a fever near Kherson. John Howard was a selfless prison-reformer, who had dared to expose the misery of jails and hospitals on his travels across the world, not least in Potemkin’s Viceroyalty. Serenissimus sent his doctor to tend him, but Howard died. The Duke of Leeds, the British Foreign Secretary, wrote to say that ‘the British nation will never forget’ such sensibilité and Potemkin replied, ‘Mr Howard had every right to my attentions. He was the famous friend of Humanity and a British citizen and these, Monsieur le Duc, are claims enough to acquire my esteem.’ Howard became a Russian, and Soviet, hero.⁵³

—

The Prince of Taurida now turned his guns and imagination on to Russia’s once and future enemy, Poland. The so-called ‘Patriots’, elated at the prospect of gaining a strong constitution, expelling the Russians and receiving Galicia from Austria, controlled Warsaw. The strain of losing Poland took its toll on Catherine and Potemkin – he suffered hangnail and rheumatism. Catherine sweetly sent him a ‘whole pharmacy of medicines’ and ‘a fox fur coat with a sable hat’.⁵⁴ If it came to war against Prussia and Poland, ‘I will take command in person,’ Potemkin told Leopold.⁵⁵ While the Austrians panicked and asked for Russian assistance, military operations against the Turks were suspended.

Catherine regarded Poland as an enemy to be dealt with when she had the chance, but Potemkin’s protean imagination had for some time been evolving a plan to insert a Trojan Horse into the Commonwealth. The Trojan Horse was himself, backed by his Orthodox co-religionists in eastern Poland and by his new Cossack Host. He would raise Orthodox Poland in the Palatinates of Bratslav, Kiev and Podolia (where his huge estates lay) against the Catholic centre, on behalf of Russia, in the Cossack tradition of Hetman Bogdan Khmelnitsky. So, after taking Bender, he asked Catherine to grant him a new title with special historic resonance: grand hetman.⁵⁶

‘Your plan is very good,’ replied the Empress, though she wondered if the Hetmanate would provoke more hatred in the Polish Sejm.⁵⁷ Nonetheless in January, she appointed him ‘Grand Hetman of the Black Sea and Ekaterinoslav Cossack Hosts’. Potemkin was delighted with his Hetmanate and designed a resplendent new uniform in which he posed round Jassy.⁵⁸ His own extravagance grated on his sometimes coenobitic nature: he had the sensitivity to notice that his poorer officers could not keep up, so he ordered everyone, including himself, to wear plain cloth tunics – much more Spartan, he told Catherine.⁵⁹ He had become careful to share his glory with the Empress. When she hailed him as ‘my Hetman’, he replied: ‘Of course I’m yours! I can boast that I owe nothing to anyone except you.’⁶⁰

Potemkin, who already effectively controlled Russian foreign policy towards Austria and Turkey, was taking over Polish policy too. He demanded the sacking of the Russian Ambassador in Warsaw, Stackelberg, whom he called a scared ‘rabbit’,⁶¹ so Catherine appointed Potemkin’s ally Bulgakov.⁶² She knew that Potemkin had his own interests in Poland and remained sensitive to the possibility of his forming an independent duchy out of his lands. He reassured her that ‘there’s nothing I wish for myself here’ and, as for the hetman title, ‘if your welfare did not demand it’, he did not need a ‘phantom that was more comic than distinguished’. Meanwhile he spent the spring building up his own Cossack Host – even persuading some of his Zaporogian bachelors to marry.⁶³

Potemkin’s Hetmanate did outrage the Patriots in Warsaw. Rumours of his plans to become king of Poland reached a new intensity. The Prince indignantly denied this ambition to Bezborodko: ‘It’s forgivable for the King [of Poland] to think I want his place. For me, let the devil be there. What a sin it is to think that I may have other interests than those of the state.’⁶⁴ Potemkin was probably telling the truth: the crown of Poland was a fool’s cap. A Ukrainian or Moldavian duchy loosely attached to Poland was more feasible. Besides, he had long since convinced himself of that statesman’s vanity – that what was good for Potemkin was good for Russia.

—

The French and Polish Revolutions changed the atmosphere at Catherine’s Court as well as her foreign policy. She was alarmed by the spread of French ideas – or ‘poison’ as she called them – and was determined to suppress them in Russia. In May 1790, when Russia was losing its Austrian ally, the Swedish War was critical, and the Prusso-Polish alliance threatened to open a new front, a young nobleman named Alexander Radishchev published an anonymous book, A Journey from St Petersburg to Moscow, which was veiled attack on Catherine, serfdom and Potemkin, whom he implied was an Oriental tyrant. However, it was the application of French Revolutionary principles to Russia, not merely the insults about Potemkin, that outraged her. Radishchev was arrested, tried for sedition and lèse-majesté – and sentenced to death.

The Prince intervened on the author’s behalf, even though the Revolutions had made this a dangerous time to undermine the regime, even though he was personally attacked, and despite the pressure on him. ‘I’ve read the book sent to me. I am not angry…It seems, Matushka, he’s been slandering you too. And you also won’t be angry. Your deeds are your shield.’ Potemkin’s generous response and sense of proportion calmed Catherine. She commuted the sentence and Radishchev was exiled to Siberia. ‘The monarch’s mercy’, wrote the writer’s grateful brother on 17 May 1791, ‘was obtained by Prince Grigory Alexandrovich.’⁶⁵

—

The Prince was still negotiating with the Grand Vizier. Catherine decided that the demand for an independent Moldavia with its own prince (Potemkin) was excessive, given the Porte’s new treaty with Prussia. The ever flexible Prince seamlessly switched policies and proposed instead that Moldavia be given to Poland as a morsel to tempt the Commonwealth back to the Russian fold. He lost nothing because it could still become his private Polish duchy.⁶⁶ Serenissimus was suffering. ‘Anxiety of such uncertainty weakens me: deprived of sleep and food,’ he told her, ‘I’m worse than a baby in arms.’ He did not forget Zubov either: Potemkin loved Catherine’s young lover ‘more and more, for he pleases you’.⁶⁷

Once Sultan Selim was committed to fight on, backed by Prussia, the Grand Vizier’s peace policy became obsolete. The ex-Capitan-Pasha was too prestigious to kill openly, so the Crocodile of Sea Battles perished mysteriously on 18 March 1790, probably of the Sultan’s poison. This alarmed Catherine. ‘For God’s sake,’ she warned Potemkin. ‘Be on guard against the Turk…He may poison you. They use such tricks…and it’s possible the Prussians will give them the opportunity’ to exterminate the man ‘whom they fear most’.⁶⁸ Meanwhile, the Turks in Moldavia took the opportunity to defeat Coburg’s Austrian army, which provoked a Potemkinian outburst to Catherine that the Austrian Field-Marshal had ‘gone like a fool and been thrashed like a whore’. But the inconsistent King of Prussia was shocked when he learned that his new treaty with the Porte committed him to fight Russia and disowned the alliance, recalling his envoy Dietz in disgrace. Frederick William was more interested in fighting the Austrians. In May, he assumed personal command of his army.⁶⁹

The Habsburgs succumbed to the Prussian threat. Leopold abandoned Joseph’s hopes of winning Turkish territory in order to restore order to his own provinces and negotiated a rapprochement with Prussia, therefore withdrawing from the Turkish War. On 16/27 July at Reichenbach, Leopold agreed to the Anglo-Prussian demands of instant armistice on the basis of the status quo ante bellum. Prussia celebrated this victory by raising the stakes: Frederick William ratified Dietz’s Prusso-Turkish treaty after all. Russia stood alone in the cold war against Prussia, England and Poland, and in the hot one against Turkey and Sweden.

On 28 June, the Swedes for the first time defeated the Russian Baltic Fleet, now commanded by Nassau, whose recklessness caught up with him at Svensksund.⁷⁰ But Catherine, who hated admitting bad news, delayed telling Potemkin for three weeks.⁷¹ However, this cloud had a silver lining – the Swedish victory saved Gustavus’ reputation, therefore allowing him to seek an honourable peace, signed on 3/14 August at Verela, based on the status quo ante bellum. ‘We’ve pulled one paw out of the mud,’ exulted Catherine to Potemkin. ‘When we pull the other one out, then we’ll sing Hallelujah!’⁷²

The withdrawal of Austria from the war had temporarily alleviated the threat from Prussia too. Potemkin and Catherine realized that, while Prussia and England cooked up their next move, there was a chance to break the Turks, who had strengthened their forces on the Danube and in the Caucasus. The Prince was as ‘tired as a dog’, travelling back and forth the 1,000 versts between Kherson, Ochakov and his new naval base, Nikolaev, to inspect his ships. Nonetheless, he created an amphibious strategy to reduce the Turkish fortresses on the Danube which would open the road to Constantinople.⁷³ The fleet was to patrol the Black Sea. The army was to take the Danubian fortresses. The flotilla – a most Potemkinian improvisation of converted imperial barges, Benthamite gunboats, Zaporogian chaiki and a Marseilles merchantman disguised as a warship, commanded by Ribas and his motley crew of ‘Greek brigands, Corfiote renegades and Italian Counts’⁷⁴ – was to fight its way up the Danube to rendezvous with the army beneath the most formidable Turkish fortress in Europe: Ismail.

Potemkin personally devised the training for the amphibious troops on Ribas’s flotilla over the summer: his instructions, which show that the Prince’s ideas predated Suvorov’s much more famous Art of Victory, reveal his modernity, imagination and military skill. ‘Find out who’s most fit for precise shooting, who’s good at running and who is skilled in swimming,’ he demanded in an order that shows he envisaged what we would call marine assault commandos, lightly armed and highly skilled. Simultaneously, in the Caucasus, he also ordered his Kuban and Caucasus generals to destroy the 40,000-strong army of Batal-Pasha before moving on the great Ottoman fortress of Anapa.⁷⁵

In August, the Prince of Taurida established new headquarters in the captured fortress of Bender on the Dniester, a convenient place to supervise his armies and navies on all fronts while keeping in contact with Warsaw, Vienna and Petersburg. Here, in this half-destroyed Tartar town, surrounded by steppes, he indulged himself in a Sardanapalian effulgence that beggared even his Jassy Court.

—

New campaign, new mistress: his relationship with Praskovia Potemkin, whom he had loved for two years, ended in Jassy and she was sent to join her complaisant husband in the field. As armies marched, barges rowed and fleets sailed, Potemkin may have enjoyed a short affair with Ekaterina Samoilova, the lascivious niece-by-marriage who had loved Damas at Ochakov. Ligne wrote to say he ‘tenderly loved’ Potemkin and was jealous that he was missing ‘the beautiful eyes, beautiful smile and noble indifference of Madame Samoilova’.

However, she did not last long because Praskovia’s place as ‘favourite sultana’ was then taken by Princess Ekaterina Dolgorukaya, just twenty-one years old and said to be the prettiest girl in Russia. ‘Her beauty struck me,’ wrote the painter Vigée Lebrun. ‘Her features had something Greek mixed with something Jewish about them, above all in profile.’ Her long dark hair, let down carelessly, fell on her shoulders. She had full lips, light blue-grey eyes, ivory skin and splendid figure.⁷⁶ Potemkin’s Court was also enlivened by the arrival of exiles from the French Revolution who had volunteered to fight for Russia.

One of them was Alexandre, Comte de Langeron, a veteran of the American War, who was precisely the sort of Gallo-centric aristocrat who sneered at primitive Russians – and was so outraged by Potemkin’s sybaritic splendour that his account regurgitates every malicious lie he heard. Langeron’s (and Ligne’s) bitter memoirs of Potemkin have dominated his historical image in the West ever since. Yet Langeron ended a disappointed man, unjustly cashiered by Alexander I after the Battle of Austerlitz, then forgiven, and later appointed governor-general of the south, in which job he lasted a year. ‘Incapable of commanding a corps,’ wrote Wiegel, ‘he got command of a country.’ Only after these failures was he big enough to recognize Potemkin’s greatness and pen a passionate tribute.

Langeron was joined by his more gifted compatriot, the twenty-four-year-old Armand du Plessis, Duc de Richelieu, who left us a less prejudiced account of life with Serenissimus. This admirable aristocrat, with fine, serious features, curly locks and sardonic eyes, was a great-nephew of Louis XIII’s Cardinal and a grandson of Louis XV’s swashbuckling Field-Marshal. He inherited the cool shrewdness of the former and the cosmopolitan tolerance of the latter.⁷⁷

Ten days and nights on the road staying at dimly lit inns had not prepared Richelieu for the spectacle that struck his eyes on entering the Prince’s salon in the Pasha’s Palace in Bender: ‘a divan stuffed with gold under a superb baldaquin; five charming women with all the taste and careless elegance possible, and the sixth dressed with all the magnificence of Greek costume, lay on sofas in the Oriental manner’. Even the carpet was interwoven with gold. Flowers, gold and rubies were strewn around. Filigree scent-boxes wafted exquisite Arabian perfumes – ‘Asiatic magic’. Potemkin himself, wearing a voluminous sable-edged coat with the diamond stars of the Orders of St Andrew and St George, and little else, sat among them – but closest to Princess Dolgorukaya, who was daringly wearing Turkic costume like an odalisque (except the pantaloons). She never left his side.

Supper was served in a hall by tall Cuirassiers with silver belts and breastplates, red capes and high fur hats surmounted by a tuft of feathers. They walked ‘two by two in pairs…like the Guards in tragedy plays’, while the orchestra performed. Richelieu was introduced to Potemkin, who greeted him shyly. He was then relieved him to lose himself in the crowd and find his friends Damas and Langeron.⁷⁸ The Prince, wrote Richelieu, surpassed ‘all that the imagination can define as the most absolute. Nothing is impossible to his power – he commands today from Mount Caucasus to the Danube and he also shares with the Empress the rest of the Government of the Empire.’⁷⁹

Fifty officers were gathered at the end of the brightly illuminated salon keeping their distance and waiting on the Prince. ‘Here one saw a dethroned Sultan, established for three years in the Prince’s antechamber, then another Sovereign who became a Cossack Colonel, there one saw an apostate Pasha, here a Macedonian and then further along Persian ambassadors’⁸⁰ – and amid this bazaar sat Samuel Bentham, waiting for his papers to go home. Potemkin felt this Court lacked a painter, specifically the only artist ever allowed to paint him properly – Lampi. So he wrote to Kaunitz in Vienna, asking him to despatch the artist to Bender: ‘It relaxes my mind to have good painters around me who work under my gaze.’⁸¹

‘All that can serve the pleasure of a capital city’, noted Richelieu, ‘accompanies Prince Potemkin in the midst of camps and the tumult of armies.’⁸² The surreal daily life there resembled Petersburg with its little suppers, musical recitals, gambling, love affairs, jealousies, ‘all that beauty inspires with the delicious, cruel, and perfidious’.⁸³ The Prince existed in a bizarre world so rarefied that ‘the word “impossible” had to be deleted from the grammar’. It was said that the magnificence with which he celebrated his love for Dolgorukaya ‘surpassed all that we read in 1001 Nights’.⁸⁴ Whatever she wanted from the four corners of the world, she got. There were no longer any limits. The Princess said she liked dancers. When Potemkin heard of two captains who were the best gypsy dancers in Russia, he sent for them by courier – even though they were in the Caucasus. When they finally arrived, they danced daily, after dinner – one dressed as a girl, the other as a peasant. ‘I’ve never seen a better dance in all my life,’ recalled Potemkin’s adjutant, Engelhardt.⁸⁵

The Prince decided to build a subterranean palace for the Princess: he was bored with moving between his palace and the residences of his sultanas, so two regiments of Grenadiers worked for two weeks to build this trogledytic residence. When it was finished, Potemkin decorated its interior with Greek columns, velvet sofas and ‘every imaginable luxury’.⁸⁶ Even Russians were awestruck by such extravagance, but the entire Russian army spent the winter in their zemliankas and the officers’ dug-outs were ‘as comfortable as houses’ with thatched roofs and chimneys.⁸⁷ Potemkin of course went considerably further: there was a gallery for the orchestra but the sound was slightly ‘dulled’, which produced an even finer resonance. The inner sanctum of this underground pleasure dome was, like the seraglio, a series of more and more secret rooms: outside there were the generals. Then the apartment itself was divided into two: in the first men gambled day and night, but the second contained a divan where the Prince lay, surrounded by his harem, but always closer and closer to Princess Dolgorukaya.

Ignoring the rules of civilized adultery, ‘alive with passion and reassured by his excess of despotism’, Potemkin sometimes forgot that the others were even there and caressed the Princess with ‘excessive familiarity’ as if she was just a low-born courtesan, instead of one of Russia’s grandest noblewomen. The Princess would then laughingly repulse him.⁸⁸ When her friend Countess Golovina arrived, she was repelled by this tainted passion ‘based on vanity’. Virtuous Golovina initially believed Dolgorukaya’s insistence that there was no sexual relationship with Serenissimus, who was thirty years older. But then Dolgorukaya could not restrain herself any longer and suddenly ‘gave way to a coquetry so shocking’ that all was revealed.⁸⁹ Her husband Vasily Dolgorukay interrupted Potemkin’s fun whenever possible. Langeron says Serenissimus seized him by the collar and shouted: ‘You miserable man, it’s me who gave you all those medals, none of which you deserved! You are nothing but mud and I’ll make of you what I wish!’ The Frenchman commented, ‘this scene would have caused some astonishment in Paris, London or Vienna’.⁹⁰

On one occasion, maybe during Sarti’s Ochakov cannonade, the Prince arranged his Ekaterinoslav Grenadiers with their hundred cannons and forty blank cartridges for each soldier in a square around the subterranean palace. The drummers drummed. He cavorted inside the underground palace with the Princess and, at a supreme moment, gave the sign to fire. When her husband heard of this orgasmic salvo, he commented with a shrug, ‘What a lot of noise about nothing.’⁹¹

Potemkin excelled himself at Princess Dolgorukaya’s birthday-dinner. Dessert was served. The guests were amazed to find their crystal goblets filled with diamonds instead of bonbons, which were served to them piled on long spoons. Even the spoilt Princess, sitting beside Potemkin, was impressed. ‘It’s all for your sake,’ he whispered. ‘When it’s you I fête, what astonishes you?’⁹²

—

Potemkin’s indolence was always more apparent than real, but it served to confirm every foreign prejudice about Russian barbarism. Yet at the very moment when Langeron claimed he spent his time canoodling with Dolgorukaya, the archives attest that he had never worked so hard, or on such a colossal canvas. He was overseeing the building of his towns in such detail that he was specifying the shape of Nikolaev’s churchbells, the position of its fountains and the angle of the batteries around its Admiralty; supervising Faleev’s building of more gunboats and ships-of-the-line at the Ingul shipyards; reorganizing the war in the Caucasus and Kuban (sacking his commander there, Bibikov, for bungling the march on Anapa through ‘incompetence and negligence’, and appointing his successors), discussing the strategy of his flotilla with Ribas while ordering him to investigate financial abuse by officers. He also devised a new signalling system for the fleet and training for its gunners.

On Polish matters, he finally agreed with Princess Lubomirska to grant her his Dubrovna estate as part of the payment for Smila.^*6 He was instructing the Russian ambassadors to Warsaw, Stackelberg, then Bulgakov, on Russian policy, and receiving secret reports from Baron d’Asch in Warsaw about the Polish Revolution, dealing with King Stanislas-Augustus’ complaints about his Cossacks stealing Polish horses, and discussing his Hetmanate and secret Polish plans with pro-Russian magnates. Serenissimus was constantly reforming and improving the army, adding more light cavalry and ever more Cossacks, but he was also intent on deliberately watering down the aristocratic content of the elite Guards Regiments, promoting foreigners, Cossacks and Old Believers, much to the disgust of the higher nobility. He told Catherine that the officers of the Preobrazhensky had been ‘weakened by luxury’. He was therefore involved in a little more than just the seduction of Dolgorukaya. ‘My occupations are innumerable,’ he told Princess Lubormirska in a slight exaggeration. ‘They do not leave me a moment to think about myself.’⁹³

Then there was the international situation. The Poles were arming themselves: if they backed Prussia too closely, ‘it will be time to proceed to your plan’, Catherine told Grand Hetman Potemkin.⁹⁴ Worst of all, the British and Prussians were now cooking up a war to stop the Russians. Catherine and Potemkin watched the storm clouds cautiously, though both had cheered up since the Swedish peace. Catherine confided that she was so ‘merry’ that her dresses were getting tight and needed to be let out. Nevertheless, she missed her consort: ‘I often feel, my friend, that on many occasions, I would like to talk to you for a quarter of an hour.’⁹⁵ When the Prussian minister fainted and hit his head on the throne at Catherine’s Swedish peace celebrations, they saw it as a good omen. But the ‘extremely tired’ Catherine, so like Potemkin, always became ill once the tension broke. Now she almost collapsed. She confided she had a ‘strong bout of diarrhoea’ and ‘colic wind’.⁹⁶

The Prince was now the bogeyman of Prussians and Polish Patriots, who were assailing his regal ambitions; and, since 1789, there had been moves afoot in the Sejm to annul his indigenat and confiscate his Polish estates, involving him in yet more complex negotiations.⁹⁷ Perhaps dreaming of retirement and security, he asked Catherine to grant him some southern land he had noticed: ‘I’ve got enough but there is no place I could lay my head pleasantly.’ She granted it and sent him a gold coffee set and a diamond ring.⁹⁸

There was one more burst of negotiating before Potemkin realized that only war would force the Turks to the table while Prussia and England were encouraging them. ‘I’m bored by Turkish fairy-tales,’ Potemkin told his negotiator, Lazhkarev. ‘Explain to them that if they want peace, do it more quickly – or I’ll defeat them.’⁹⁹ It was to be war.

—

In March, he had assumed personal command of the Black Sea Fleet and appointed Rear-Admiral Fyodor Ushakov as his deputy – another of his outstanding choices. On 24 June, he ordered him to sea to ‘confront the enemy’. After inspecting the fleet himself, he sent him out again on 3 July: ‘Pray to God He will help us. Put all hopes in Him, cheer up the crews and inspire them for battle…’.¹⁰⁰ Ushakov twice defeated the Turks, on 8 July, and 28/29 August off Tendra, blowing up their flagship. It was only seven years since Serenissimus had founded the fleet. ‘In the north you’ve multiplied the Fleet,’ Potemkin told Catherine, ‘but here you’ve created it out of nothing.’¹⁰¹ She agreed that it was their baby – ‘an enterprise of our own, hence close to our hearts’.¹⁰² Potemkin now ordered his flotilla to fight its way into the Danube. ‘I’ve ordered the Sebastopol Fleet to sea,’ he told Ribas, ‘and to make itself visible to you. You and your flotilla should be ready to join them at the mouth of the Danube…Inform me of everything.’¹⁰³ In September, Potemkin rushed down to Nikolaev and the Crimea to inspect the fleets and then ordered the army to advance south towards the Danube.

On another coast of the Black Sea, there was more good news: on 30 September, General Herman eliminated a 25,000-strong Turkish army and captured Batal-Pasha. ‘We hardly lost 40 men!’, Potemkin told Bezborodko.¹⁰⁴ Nearer home, he ordered the taking of Kilia on the Danube, which failed bloodily on the first attempt because Ribas had not yet managed to destroy the Turkish Danube flotilla. Potemkin attempted a second storming and Kilia fell on 18 October 1790.¹⁰⁵ Ribas broke into the Danube two days later and took Tulcha and Isackcha, as he worked his way up towards mighty Ismail. The Prince trusted and admired Ribas. ‘Having you there,’ he wrote, ‘I leave it under your command.’¹⁰⁶ By the end of November, the entire lower Danube as far as Galatz was his – except for Ismail. Potemkin decided to take the fortress. ‘I will make an attempt on Ismail,’ he said, ‘but I don’t want to lose ten men.’¹⁰⁷

—

Far to the west, Richelieu, Langeron and the Prince de Ligne’s son Charles were dining in Vienna, where they had gone to grumble about Potemkin’s inactivity, when they heard of Batal-Pasha’s defeat and the investment of Ismail. They left immediately and galloped to re-enlist with Potemkin at Bender. ‘I beg Your Highness to let me rejoin the army before Ismail,’ Langeron wrote to him.¹⁰⁸ No young sabre wanted to miss the assault – the climax of Potemkin’s military career and one of the bloodiest days of the century.

Skip Notes

*1 Lazhkarev, whom Westerners compared to a gypsy clown, once repelled an Islamic mob in Negroponte by leaping off a balcony with a basin of water, threatening them with the horror of instant baptism. Later, in Alexander I’s entourage at Tilsit in 1807, it was he who met Napoleon and negotiated Russia’s annexation of Bessarabia, ceded by the Porte in the 1808 treaty, in return for French domination of Europe.

*2 While Potemkin later came to represent hated Russian imperialism to the Rumanians, a French visitor, forty years on, found that the Jassy boyars still regarded him as an early father of Rumanian nationalism. This made sense since Dacia roughly forms Rumania. However, the sole legacy of the name was President Ceaucescu’s decision to name the national make of car the ‘Dacia’.

*3 The Ghika Palace still stands: it is now the Medical Faculty of Iaşi University. It has been expanded, but it still has its original Classical portico.

*4 It was Sutherland’s English roast beef which Potemkin so enjoyed, when he came for dinner, that he had it wrapped up and took it home with him.

*5 Potemkin also suggested that, if the Turks would back a Russian nominee for King of Poland, Russia would consider keeping the Bug as the border. In other words, Russia would use Ottoman help to retake Poland and, in either case, Potemkin had the potential to secure a crown for himself – Poland or Dacia. Nonetheless, even for Poland, it is hard to believe Potemkin would have accepted the Bug border, which would have meant surrendering Ochakov.

*6 Potemkin’s Dubrovna appears in the history of Napoleon. The Emperor was to stay in Princess Lubomirska’s manorhouse in November 1812 during the Retreat from Moscow.