Catherine the Great & Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair

32

CARNIVAL AND CRISIS

That Marshal Prince Potemkin gave us a superb party yesterday at which I stayed from seven in the evening until two in the morning when I went home…Now I am writing to you to improve my headache.

Catherine II to Baron Grimm

At 7 p.m. on 28 April 1791, the imperial coach arrived before the Classical colonnade of the Prince’s palace on Horse-Guards, which was illuminated with hundreds of torches. The Empress, wearing a full-length long-sleeved Russian dress with a rich diadem, dismounted slowly in the rain. Potemkin stepped forward to greet her. He wore a scarlet tailcoat and, tossed over his shoulders, a gold and black lace cloak, ornamented with diamonds. He was covered with ‘as many diamonds as a man could possibly wear’.¹ Behind him, an adjutant held a pillow that bore his hat, which was so weighed down with diamonds that it could barely be worn. Potemkin moved towards her through two lines of footmen, wearing their master’s livery of pale-yellow with blue and silver. Each bore a candelabrum. Bathed in this imperial effulgence, Potemkin knelt on one knee before Catherine. She brought him to his feet. He took her hand.

There was a dull roar as 5,000 members of the public, more interested in eating than in observing history, rushed forward to feast on tables of free food and drink. There were swings, roundabouts and even shops where people were given costumes, but now they wanted the food. The Prince had ordered that it should be laid out after the Empress had entered. But a steward mistook a courtier’s carriage and started the feast too early. There was almost a riot. For a second, Catherine, nervous of the people as the French Revolution dismantled the Bourbon monarchy, thought ‘the honourable public’ were stampeding. She was relieved to see they were simply filling their pockets with food to take home.²

The Prince led his Empress towards the door of the Palace, later named the Taurida, which set a new standard for Classical simplicity and grandeur. ‘All was gigantic.’ That was its clear message: the façade was plain and colossal, designed by the architect Ivan Starov to symbolize Potemkin’s power and splendour. Two long wings led out from a domed portico supported by six Doric columns. Inside, the couple entered an anteroom and walked along a receiving line that led into the Cupola or Colonnade Hall, where the Grand Duke Paul and his wife along with 3,000 guests awaited Catherine in their costumes.

‘Imagine it if you can!’, Catherine dared Grimm. The Hall was the biggest in Europe – 21 metres high, its oval shape was 74.5 metres long and 14.9 metres wide, supported by two rows of thirty-six Ionic columns – the ‘poetry of columns’ that dwarfed the thousands of guests. (It could easily hold 5,000 people.) The floors were inlaid with precious woods and decorated with ‘astonishingly huge’ white marble vases, the ceilings hung with multi-tiered chandeliers of black crystal – treasures bought from the Duchess of Kingston. At each end was a double row of French windows.³ The entire Hall was so bright it almost appeared to be on fire, illuminated by the massive chandeliers and fifty-six smaller ones each with sixteen candles. Five thousand torches burned. The wind orchestra of 300 musicians and an organ, accompanied by choirs – all hidden in the two galleries – burst into a concert of specially written choral pieces.

Straight ahead of her, the Empress could not miss the famous Winter Garden. This too was the biggest in Europe, for it was the same size again as the rest of a palace that covered 650,700 square feet. The huge glass hall was supported by columns in the form of palm-trees which contained warm water pipes. This was William Gould’s chef d’oeuvre – an organized jungle of exotic plants, ‘flowers, hyacinths and narcissuses, myrtles, orange trees in plenty’ – where the walls were all mirrors that concealed more immense stoves.^*1 Lamps and diamonds were hidden in mock bunches of grapes, clusters of pears and pineapples so that everything seemed alight. Silver and scarlet fishes swam in glass globes. The cupola was painted like the sky. Paths and little hillocks crisscrossed this arbour, leading to statues of goddesses. Its most striking effect was its ‘infinite perspective’, for Catherine could see straight through the brightness of the Colonnade Hall into the tropical lightness of the Winter Garden and, further, through its glass walls into the English Garden outside, where its ‘sanded paths wind, hills rise up, valleys fall away, cuttings open groves, ponds sparkle’,⁴ its follies and hills, still snow-covered, rolling all the way down to the Neva. The tropical forest and the snowy hills – which was real?

In the midst of the Winter Garden stood a temple to the Empress on a diamond-studded pyramid. At the feet of Shubin’s statue of Catherine the Legislatrix, a placard from Potemkin read: ‘To the Mother of the Motherland and my benefactress’.⁵ The Prince escorted Catherine to the left of the Colonnade Hall on to a raised dais, covered in Persian carpets, facing the garden. Out of the tropical gardens came two quadrilles, each of twenty-four children, ‘the most beautiful in St Petersburg’ according to Catherine, dressed in costumes of sky blue and pink, and covered from head to foot in ‘all the jewels of the town and suburbs’ – the boys in Spanish garb, the girls in Greek. Grand Duke Alexander, the future Emperor and vanquisher of Napoleon, danced a complicated ballet in the first quadrille, choreographed by Le Picq, the celebrated dancemaster. Grand Duke Constantine danced in the second. ‘It’s impossible’, wrote Catherine afterwards, ‘to see anything more gorgeous, more varied or more brilliant’. Then Le Picq himself danced a solo.

As darkness fell, Potemkin conducted the imperial family, followed by the entire party, into the Gobelins Room, where the tapestries told the story of Esther. In the midst of sofas and chairs stood a Potemkinian wonder: a lifesized gold elephant, covered in emeralds and rubies, with a clock concealed in its base, ridden by a blackamoor mahout in Persian silks who gave a signal at which curtains were raised to reveal a stage and amphitheatre with boxes. Two French comedies and a ballet were followed by a procession of all the peoples of the Empire, including captured Ottoman pashas from Ismail, in the Asiatic splendour of their national dress. While guests watched the show, servants in the other halls were lighting a further 140,000 lamps and 20,000 wax candles. When the Empress returned, the Colonnade Hall was bathed in a blaze of light.

The Prince took Catherine by the hand to the Winter Garden. When they stood before the statue in the temple, he again fell to his knees and thanked the Empress. She raised him to his feet and kissed him tenderly on the forehead: she thanked him for his deeds and devotion. Derzhavin’s ‘Ode’ to Potemkin’s victories was recited: ‘Thunder of victory, ring! Brave Rus, rejoice!’⁶

Potemkin signalled the orchestra. The ball began at last. Catherine played cards with her daughter-in-law in the Gobelins Room, then went to rest. Just as he had apartments in her palaces, so Catherine had a bedroom in his. Their rooms here showed their cosy intimacy together. Both loved monumental palaces and tiny bedrooms: her bedroom was in Potemkin’s wing and its ceiling was decorated with Classical symbols of voluptuousness, goats and shepherds. There was a secret door, concealed behind a rug hung on the wall, into Potemkin’s anteroom, bedroom and study, so that they could enter each other’s rooms. His bedroom was simple, snug and light, with walls of plain silk.^*2 (Sometimes, when he was in residence, she is said to have stayed; she certainly held dinners there.)⁷

At midnight, Catherine returned for the supper in such high spirits that the forty-eight children returned to dance their quadrilles all over again. The Empress’s table, placed where the orchestra in the amphitheatre had played, was covered in gold. Forty-eight magnates sat down around her. Fourteen tables surrounded hers. There were other tables and buffets in different halls. Each was illuminated by a ball of white and blue glass. On one table, a huge silver goblet stood between two more of the Duchess of Kingston’s gargantuan vases. While waiters in Potemkin’s livery served, the Prince stood behind the Empress’s chair, looming over her like a diamond-glinting Cyclops, and served her himself until she insisted he sit down and join her. After dinner, there were more concerts and the ball began again. At 2 a.m., four hours after she usually left balls, the Empress rose to leave. The Prince of Taurida led her out as he had led her in.

In the vestibule, Serenissimus fell to his knees – the ritual submission of this scarlet-coated giant before his empress, in front of the great of the Empire and the cabinets of Europe. He had had her bedroom prepared if she wished to stay. It was unlikely, but he wanted to be able to offer it. She was too tired to stay any longer. The orchestra was primed with two different airs – one if the Empress stayed, and one if she left. If she was leaving, Potemkin had arranged to put his hand on his heart, and, when he did, the orchestra burst into the melancholic bars of a lover’s lament, written, long before, by the Prince himself. ‘The only thing that matters in the world’, went the cantata, ‘is you.’ The magnificence of the ball, the sadness of the song and the sight of this unwieldy one-eyed giant on his knees touched Catherine. The partners felt old and had loved each other for a very long time. Both of them burst into tears. He kissed her hand again and again, and they sobbed together before she climbed into her carriage and drove away.⁸

This looked like a parting. It is often interpreted as a premonition of Potemkin’s death. So much of this last stay in St Petersburg is distorted by hindsight.^*3 But it was a most emotional night, the climax of their adventure together. Potemkin lingered among the debris of the party, touched by melancholy and nostalgia, almost in a trance.

When he came to say goodbye to one lady who knew him well – Countess Natalia Zakrevskaya – she noticed his air of sadness. Her heart went out to him. She knew him well enough to say: ‘I don’t know what will become of you. You are younger than the Sovereign. You’ll outlive her: what will become of you then? You would never agree to be the second man.’ Potemkin contemplated this dreamily: ‘Don’t worry. I’ll die before the Sovereign. I’ll die soon.’ She never saw him again.⁹

‘That fête was magnificent,’ wrote Stedingk, who was there, ‘and no other man could have given it.’¹⁰ But it had been irresponsibly extravagant – Potemkin supposedly spent between 150,000 and 500,000 roubles during those three months. Everyone knew that the Treasury was paying for the ball as it paid all his bills, but it was soon widely believed that, as Stedingk reported, ‘this prodigality displeases the Empress’.

Catherine was so overexcited when she got home that night that she could not sleep. She got over her ‘little headache’ by writing to Grimm to rave about the ‘fête superbe’ with the enthusiasm of a young girl the morning after her début. She even drew a map to show Grimm where she sat and told him how late she stayed: so much for her disapproval! Then she ‘spun’ Grimm the political purpose of what was clearly a joint Catherine–Potemkin production: ‘There you are, Monsieur, that is how, in the midst of trouble and war and the menaces of dictators [she meant Frederick William of Prussia], we conduct ourselves in Petersburg.’ There is no evidence that she grumbled about Potemkin’s expenditure, colossal and excessive though it was, but she probably did. Like all of us, she may well have got a shock when she received the bill.

Just as she was writing to Grimm, a letter arrived bringing dramatic Polish news that meant that Potemkin would have to stay in Petersburg much longer.

—

On 22 April/3 May 1791, the Commonwealth of Poland and Lithuania had adopted a new constitution amid tumultuous scenes in the Sejm: one deputy even drew his sword in mid-debate and threatened to kill his son like Abraham and Isaac. Poland’s ‘May the Third’ Revolution created a hereditary monarchy, in which the succession was to be offered to the Elector of Saxony or his daughter, with a strong executive, almost combining the powers of the English Crown and American presidency, and an army. Warsaw celebrated with the slogan ‘The King with the Nation’. Those who had thought Poland was beyond help were impressed. ‘Happy people,’ wrote Burke, ‘happy prince.’

The timing was useful for the Russians but unfortunate for the Poles, because the Anglo-Prussian coalition was about to free Russia’s hands to deal with their awkward and recalcitrant satellite. Catherine shared Potemkin’s disgust for the French Revolution: Republicanism was ‘a sickness of the mind’ she declared, and she was already cracking down on radical ideas in Russia itself. The Polish Revolution was actually politically conservative, strengthening, not weakening, the monarchy, decreasing, not increasing, the franchise. But Catherine chose to regard it as a Jacobin extension of the French Revolution into her sphere of influence: ‘We’re perfectly prepared,’ Catherine signed off ominously to Grimm, ‘and unfortunately, we don’t yield to the very devil himself!’¹¹

Potemkin, who was receiving almost daily reports from Bulgakov, Branicki and spies in Warsaw, was watching Poland closely too. He did not like what he saw¹² and resolved to take supreme control of Polish policy and put his secret plans into action. He had not yet succeeded in budging Zubov but he probably felt that an Ottoman peace and a Polish success would overpower his critics. So he stayed much longer than he had agreed with Catherine, to discuss Poland, which severely strained their partnership. But, before they could turn on Poland, they had to fight the Turks to a settlement and negotiate their way out of the Ochakov Crisis with Pitt’s emissary, Fawkener, who was about to arrive.

‘If you want to take the stone from my heart, if you want to calm the spasms,’ Catherine told Potemkin in early May, ‘then send couriers to the armies quickly and let land and sea forces start operations…’ – otherwise they would never get the peace both wanted.¹³ The Prince, in one of his moods of euphoric creativity, fired off orders to his forces while founding new settlements across the south. On 11 May, he ordered Admiral Ushakov to put to sea and pursue the enemy; Repnin, commanding the main army in his absence, to strike decisively across the Danube to destroy any concentration of Turkish forces; and Gudovich, commanding the Kuban corps, to take the strongest Ottoman fortress in those parts – Anapa.¹⁴ Meanwhile the partners worked out their Polish plans.

On 16 May, when the Anglo-Prussian crisis was still unsettled. Catherine signed her first rescript to Potemkin on Poland. The Prince could intervene only if the Prussians moved into Poland, in which case Potemkin could offer the Poles the Ottoman principality of Moldavia in return for reversing their Revolution. If they did not take this bait, Potemkin could resort to ‘extreme measures’ in the traditional way, by arranging a confederation under his Polish allies, Branicki and Potocki. Catherine specifically added that among the ‘extreme measures’ she approved ‘your secret plan’ of raising the Orthodox in Kiev, Podolia and Bratslav, under the banner of the ‘Grand Hetman’ of the Cossacks.¹⁵ It is usually claimed that Potemkin did not receive the powers he wanted.¹⁶ On the contrary, his powers were potentially vast, though conditional on the real if diminishing likelihood of Prussia and England attacking Russia. (Negotiations with Fawkener had not yet started.)^*4 Besides, Potemkin did not ‘receive’ the rescripts like a schoolboy from a headmistress: the couple worked on them together, correcting one another’s drafts, as they always had. The rescripts and correspondence show that Catherine agreed with Potemkin’s Cossack and Moldavian schemes, and had done so for more than two years.

Potemkin’s Polish schemes are the mystery of his last year: he was weaving a tapestry of overlapping threads that no one has ever managed to untwine. His plans appear protean, shifting and exotic, but the Prince never saw the need to decide on a plan until the last moment. Meanwhile, he would run all of them simultaneously. He had been contemplating the Polish question since he came to power and his Polish policies existed on many different levels, but it is impossible to divorce them from his need for a principality outside Russian borders. All these plans contain slots for Potemkin’s own realm. He had convinced himself that his ‘independent’ Polish duchy, built around his Smila estates, would be a camouflaged means for Russia to win swathes of central Europe without having to repay the other powers with a second partition of Poland.

There were four Potemkinian projects. There was annexation of Moldavia by Poland. This duchy would have fitted well into the Poland envisaged by his ally, Felix Potocki, in a letter to Potemkin that May: a federal republic of semi-independent hetmanates. Simultaneously, there was the plan for a confederation, led by Branicki and Potocki, that would overthrow the new Constitution and replace it with the old version or a new federal one with Moldavia as a bribe. Even as early as February, Potemkin had been flattering Potocki, inviting him to a meeting ‘on the veritable well-being of our common country’.¹⁷

Then there was Potemkin’s idea of invading Poland as grand hetman of the Black Sea Cossacks to liberate the Orthodox of eastern Poland. This combined his Polish ancestry, his regal ambitions, his enjoyment of drama, his Russian instinct to break the Polish Revolution – and his ‘passion for Cossacks’.¹⁸ Even before procuring the Hetmanate, Potemkin had envisaged a special Polish role for Black Sea Cossacks, recruiting them in Poland.¹⁹ On 6 July 1787, for example, Catherine let him establish four such squadrons from his own Polish villages,²⁰ where he already had his own forces: Smila’s mounted and infantry militia.²¹ Later, Alexandra Branicka explained that he ‘wanted to unite the Cossacks with the Polish army and declare himself king of Poland’.²²

This now seems the most unlikely of his plans but actually it was feasible. The Orthodox provinces of Podolia and eastern Poland, led by magnates like Felix Potocki and his old-fashioned vision of Polish freedom, were a long way from the sophisticated, Catholic Patriots who dominated the Four-Year Sejm in Warsaw with their new-fangled French concept of liberty (and who hated Potemkin). The mistake is to see this Cossack eruption in isolation: both Catherine and Potemkin clearly saw it as a way to mobilize the Orthodox population to break the power of the Revolution in Warsaw while possibly getting Serenissimus his own realm within a federated Poland, dominated by Russia.

The fourth possibility was the second partition of Poland: Potemkin was never shy about discussing a new partition and often dangled it in front of Prussian envoys; despite the views of nationalistic Polish historians, however, it was his last option. He might have made Poland cede Thorn and Danzig in April to avoid war on two more fronts in April, but that moment had passed. This proudly reborn scion of the szlachta understood that partition destroyed his ancient homeland – ‘our country’ – and it also scuppered his personal base outside Russia. Strategically, it benefited Prussia more than any other state, bringing the Hohenzollerns nearer to Russia. He favoured the Petrine policy of keeping an independent Poland as a crippled and eccentric bufferzone. Far from wanting partition, most of Potemkin’s plans, such as the Moldavian option, involved enlarging Poland, not diminishing her. If he had lived longer, he might have succeeded and helped prevent partition. If Catherine had predeceased him, it is likely he would have moved to become a Polish magnate.

Potemkin stayed in Petersburg to hammer out a Polish policy, while the stories of his sinister plans circulated in febrile revolutionary Warsaw. The Polish envoy Deboli stepped up the tension by sending Stanislas-Augustus every rumour of Potemkin’s royal ambitions. As his enemies united at Court to depose him at last, the scene was set for the bitterest crisis of his long friendship with Catherine.

—

‘We were running things all right without you, weren’t we?’, Catherine replied to Potemkin, according to the hostile Deboli. The words ring true, though the tone is that of a wife wryly scolding her husband, not divorcing him.²³ William Fawkener, Pitt’s special envoy, had arrived on 14 May, but the protracted negotiations to settle the Ochakov Crisis only really started in early June, when Catherine and Potemkin held long conversations with him. In his unpublished despatches, Fawkener observed their different styles but united message: during one audience with the Englishman, Catherine was just praising Potemkin’s surprisingly good mood when she was interrupted by one of her greyhounds barking outside at a child. She reassured the little boy and, turning pointedly to Fawkener, added: ‘Dogs that bark don’t always bite.’²⁴

Potemkin, on the other hand, invited the cowed British bulldog to dinner, where the Englishman was utterly overwhelmed by the Prince’s ebullient and entertaining soliloquy – ‘strange and full of inconsistency’. Serenissimus ‘told me he was Russian and loved his country but he loved England too; that I was an islander and consequently selfish and loved my island only’. He made a Potemkinian offer: why did not Britain have Crete (Candia) in the Mediterranean as its prize from the Ottoman bonanza? This pied-à-terre would give Britain control of Egyptian–Levantine trade. And then he went into raptures about his southern lands, the soil, the people, the fleet – ‘great projects’ whose success depended ‘solely on him’. At the end of this performance, the bewildered Fawkener admitted to London that he had not had an opportunity of getting a single word in edgeways, but it left Pitt in no doubt about the seriousness of Russia’s commitment to the Black Sea and its refusal to compromise over Ochakov.²⁵ By early July, England and Prussia realized they would simply have to buckle to Catherine’s demands.

Fawkener was further humiliated by the arrival in Petersburg of Robert Adair, sent mischievously (and possibly treasonably) by Charles James Fox as the opposition’s unofficial envoy. Simon Vorontsov ensured Adair, aged twenty-eight, a good reception by telling Potemkin that even Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, the queen of the ton, ‘honours him with her friendship’.²⁶ Adair received a ‘great welcome’ from Empress and Prince. Before he left, Potemkin gave him a present in Catherine’s name – a ring with her portrait.²⁷

—

The Prince, at the height of his dignity, now resembled a noble bear baited by a pack of dogs. Zubov played on Catherine’s almost subliminal unease about Potemkin’s domineering behaviour by implying that he was becoming a possible threat to her. ‘Some secret suspicion hid in the Empress’s heart against this Field-Marshal,’²⁸ recalled Gavrili Romanovich Derzhavin, the neo-Classical poet and civil servant. Serenissimus muttered that she was surrounded by his enemies. When Catherine was at Tsarskoe Selo for the summer, Potemkin paid fewer visits than usual and did not stay long. As an agreement with the Anglo-Prussians got closer and the Polish Question more urgent, ambassadors noticed that Catherine seemed to treat him coolly. As so often before, this coolness gave hope to Potemkin’s enemies.

Zubov was not just undermining the Prince with Catherine: first he managed to turn Suvorov²⁹ against his former patron by offering favours that Potemkin had already recommended. So Suvorov fell out with Potemkin not because of the latter’s jealousy but due to the former’s misguided intriguing. Then Zubov told Derzhavin ‘in the Empress’s name’ not to go to Potemkin for favours: Zubov would provide whatever he wanted.

Derzhavin had made his name with an ‘Ode to Princess Felitsa’, which teasingly described the Procurator-General Viazemsky as ‘choleric’ and Potemkin as ‘indolent’, yet the Prince protected him against Viazemsky and other enemies over the years.³⁰ Derzhavin repaid Potemkin’s decency with petty betrayal – and poignant poetry. (His masterpiece, The Waterfall, which inspired Pushkin, was a posthumous tribute to Potemkin.)³¹ Zubov offered Derzhavin the post of secretary to the Empress. The poet accepted the job and moderated praise of Potemkin in his poems.

When he delivered one of these. Potemkin stormed out of his bedroom, ordered his carriage and rode off ‘God knows where’ into a tempest of thunder and lightning outside. Derzhavin called meekly a few days later and Potemkin, who would have known exactly how Zubov had turned his protégé, received the poet coolly but without rancour.³²

The Prince always behaved manically at times of political tension. He chewed his nails and pursued love affairs with priapic enthusiasm. Derzhavin and foreigners like Deboli claimed he had gone mad – hinting that he suffered from the insanity of tertiary syphilis, for which there is no evidence. One night, Deboli claimed, Potemkin turned up drunk at a Countess Pushkina’s house and caressed her hair. She threatened to throw him out and he drawled that he had not given up the idea of being king of Poland.³³ This is an unlikely story. Besides even his enemies admitted that his seductions had never been more successful. ‘Women crave the attentions of Prince Potemkin’, observed his critic, Count Fyodor Rostopchin, ‘like men crave medals.’³⁴ Serenissimus gave a three-day fête in one of his houses near Tsarskoe Selo while ‘the town talk is engrossed’, Fawkener reported breathlessly to London, ‘by his quarrel with one woman, his apparent inclination for another, [and] his real attachment to a third’.³⁵

—

The trap seemed to be closing on Potemkin. Most histories claim that, when the Prince finally left St Petersburg in late July, he had been ruined by Zubov, rejected by Catherine and defeated by his enemies, and was dying from a broken heart. This could hardly be further from the truth.

In July when the Count was at Peterhof, Zubov thought he had planted enough suspicion in Catherine’s mind for his creeping coup to achieve its goal.³⁶ But who was to replace Potemkin? There was no one else of his military or political stature – with one exception. On 24 June, Count Alexei Orlov-Chesmensky mysteriously arrived. His visits to the capital since 1774 always coincided with attempts to overthrow Potemkin: he liked to boast that, when he came in the door, Potemkin left by the window.³⁷ But when Orlov-Chesmensky called at Tsarskoe Selo, Catherine let Potemkin know in a note – hardly the behaviour of a empress about to overthrow him.³⁸ During June and July, Potemkin, in town, wrote to Catherine, in Tsarskoe Selo, about his agonizing hangnail. She was concerned enough to write back, signing her notes ‘Adieu Papa’. She enclosed the usual sycophantic letter from Zubov. Potemkin also sent her a dress as a present.³⁹ Even Deboli reported that Catherine emphatically ordered Orlov-Chesmensky not to attack ‘her great friend’.⁴⁰

Furthermore Potemkin’s influence had not disappeared. When Fawkener finally suggested that England would agree to Russian terms, Potemkin simply accepted the deal himself, without even checking with Catherine. Deboli noted that this irritated Russian ministers – but it hardly suggests that he had lost his power.⁴¹ Then Potemkin delivered a series of victories: on 19 June, he announced that Kutuzov had followed his precise orders to strike at Badadag – and had defeated 20,000 Turks. On 22 June, Gudovich stormed the fortress of Anapa, where – as a bonus – he captured the Chechen hero, Sheikh Mansour who had sought refuge there.^*5 ‘This is the key that has opened the door for the big blows,’ Potemkin declared to Catherine on 2 July. ‘You’ll be pleased to see how they will roar in Asia!’ That day, maybe to reconcile with Potemkin, the Empress, accompanied by two Zubovs, came into Petersburg from Peterhof to dine with the Prince at the Taurida Palace, where she toasted her consort. So much for the imminent fall of Potemkin.⁴²

On 11 July, the Ochakov Crisis ended: the British and Prussians signed the compromise that allowed Catherine to keep Ochakov and the land between the Bug and Dniester – provided that the Turks made peace immediately. If they did not, Russia was free to fight for better terms. That very day, a courier arrived to announce that Repnin, following Potemkin’s order to strike across the Danube at enemy concentrations, had won a splendid victory at Manchin on 28 June, destroying the Grand Vizier’s army of 80,000 and preventing the two Turkish armies from combining. ‘Thank you for the good news, my friend,’ Catherine wrote to Potemkin. ‘Two holidays in one, my friend, and other wonderful events besides. I’ll come to the city to celebrate tomorrow.’ The ‘Te Deums’ were sung before the Empress at the Kazan Cathedral. Catherine threw dinners and balls, attended by the Prince, for Fawkener.⁴³

Warsaw and Petersburg now awaited Potemkin’s reaction to the May the Third Constitution. The Prince, like a giant if rusty howitzer, was turning slowly towards Poland, but what were his plans? Intrigues and plans swirled around him. Deboli was convinced that Potemkin planned to be king of Poland by creating a ‘civil war’, meaning either the Confederation or the Cossack invasion.⁴⁴ Branicki in Warsaw swaggered from planning his Confederation to patriotic suggestions to increase the size of Poland. Alexandra Branicka wanted Potemkin to be Stanislas-Augustus’ heir.⁴⁵ Warsaw had been awash for years with pamphlets warning that Potemkin would make Alexandra’s children heirs to the throne.⁴⁶ There were comical interludes amid the menace. The Prince could not resist teasing the Polish envoy, Deboli, at a party, saying that the Poles liked the Sublime Porte so much they even wore Turkish pantaloons. Deboli was offended by this trouser insult, ‘so I responded that we did not need other people’s pantaloons because we had our own’.⁴⁷

Potemkin was torn. His duty was to gallop south and negotiate peace with the Turks, but his instinct was to stay in Petersburg, where he remained exposed to Zubov, until he and Catherine had thrashed out what to do about Poland. This once again raised the tension between these two hypersensitive connoisseurs of power, who now became unhappy with each other, ruled by ‘little mutual jealousies’.⁴⁸ Catherine wanted him to focus on the peace.

When the row blew up, it was about women as well: was she still jealous of Potemkin even though she loved her Blackie or was she simply weary of his parade of debauchery? Potemkin suggested that the feckless Prince Mikhail Golitsyn be appointed one of the new army inspectors, created to wipe out abuses in the military. ‘He won’t bring credit upon you in the Army,’ replied Catherine, but she was most irritated about Golitsyn’s wife. Everyone in Petersburg now knew that Potemkin, bored of the Beautiful Greek, was infatuated by Princess Praskovia Andreevna Golitsyna (née Shuvalova), the literary but ‘restless’ girl who became the Prince’s ‘last passion’.⁴⁹ Catherine told him: ‘Let me say that his wife’s face, however nice it may be, is not worth the cost of burdening yourself with such a man…his wife may be charming but there’s absolutely nothing to gain by courting her.’ Indeed Praskovia’s family were protecting her virtue, so Potemkin might well end up with the husband without even getting the wife. Catherine pulled no punches. Both Golitsyns were deceiving him. ‘My friend, I am used to telling you the truth. You should also tell it to me.’ She begged him to go south and ‘conclude peace and after that you’ll come back here and amuse yourself as much as you wish…As for this letter, do tear it to pieces after reading it.’⁵⁰ But the Prince kept the most biting letter Catherine ever wrote to him.^*6

Her paroxysm of anger was, as so often, the letting-off of steam at the end of their argument. She had just signed her second secret rescript to Potemkin of 18 July that settled their debate and meant he could immediately leave for the south. Russian, Polish and Western historians have argued about its meaning for 200 years. Most of the confusion is caused by the problem of reconciling the extraordinary powers it granted Potemkin with the conviction that he was falling from power. The legend claims that the Prince was a broken man, haemorrhaging power, who ‘could not bear the thought of disgrace’ when ‘he learned that Platon Zubov seemed to have absolute power over the Empress’s mind’. This is what foreigners were told when they visited Petersburg in the Zubov ascendancy after Potemkin’s death.⁵¹ Since it has been accepted that Catherine and Zubov were about to remove him, how could she be giving him vast powers to make peace or war with Turks and Poles? Therefore, they argued, Catherine must have signed a sham just to get rid of him. This was based on hindsight, not on reality.⁵²

Not one contemporary in 1791 believed he was about to be dismissed. Though all of them knew that there had been rows, even the hostile foreigners Deboli and British envoy Whitworth reported that Serenissimus was increasing his power, not losing it: ‘such is the confidence reposed in him’, Whitworth told Grenville, ‘he is left in full liberty’ to make war or peace with the Turks.⁵³ As for Zubov’s intrigues, ‘there is no probability of their succeeding so unaccountable is the predilection of the Empress for him’.⁵⁴ Long afterwards, Zubov himself admitted he had ‘won a semi-victory’, by surviving Potemkin’s attempts to dislodge him, but ‘I could not remove him from my path; and it was essential to remove him because the Empress always met his wishes halfway and simply feared him as though he were an exacting husband. She loved only me but she often pointed to Potemkin as an example for me to follow.’ Zubov then revealed his true interest in the Empress’s love: ‘It is his fault I am not twice as rich as I am.’⁵⁵

Once one realizes that he was not about to be dismissed at all, it is clear the rescript was a triumph for Potemkin that more than compensated for his failure to dislodge Zubov. Once peace with the Porte was signed, Potemkin was granted massive powers to make war in Poland, to pursue his plans and even to decide the form of the Polish constitution. The Prince could negotiate with Potocki on the details, though it was vital that the Poles be seen to invite the Russians, not vice versa. But ‘our own interests demand that it be carried out as soon as possible so that the evil…will not take root’.⁵⁶ The rescript implies that Potemkin had persuaded the Empress that his plans could achieve a submissive neighbour without partition. But Catherine made clear that, if the Prince’s schemes failed, partition was the only alternative.

—

On his last night in Petersburg, Serenissimus dined at his niece Tatiana’s along with Countess Golovina, who thought him a most disreputable man. But this time he moved her. He told her again and again that he would never forget her. He was sure he was going to die soon.⁵⁷

At 4 a.m. on 24 July 1791, Potemkin set off from Tsarskoe Selo. As the Prince was galloping south at breakneck speed, the Empress sent a note after him filled with the loving warmth of their old friendship: ‘Goodbye my friend, I kiss you.’⁵⁸ They never met again.

Skip Notes

*1 Potemkin’s tsar of gardeners, William Gould, ‘lived in splendour’ in the Palladian villa Catherine had built for him in the grounds of the Taurida (still called the ‘gardener’s house’) and ‘gave entertainment to the nobility’. He died in luxurious retirement at Ormskirk in Lancashire in 1812.

*2 When the Emperor Paul set out to deface the building after his mother’s death, these little rooms so disgusted him that he did not ruin them. He simply sealed them and they alone remain today.

*3 Indeed some histories claim that this was the last time they met. In fact, Potemkin remained in Petersburg for three more eventful months.

*4 Some Polish historians regard this condition as a sham to delude Potemkin, because Catherine already knew there would be no war with Prussia. This is clearly not so. England had blinked but not surrendered. The conditions placed on Potemkin’s action were entirely reasonable. The accompanying documents discussing the creation of Polish forces to back up a Confederation show how they worked together just before his Taurida ball: he drafted a proposal that required recruitment of Polish forces, to which she added her thoughts in the margin.

*5 Mansour was despatched to Petersburg, and perished three years later in the dungeons of Schlüsselburg.

*6 It is possible but unlikely that some of Potemkin’s letters to ‘Praskovia’ quoted earlier were addressed to Praskovia Golitsyna, not Praskovia Potemkina.