Catherine the Great & Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair

EPILOGUE

LIFE AFTER DEATH

They trample heroes? – No! – Their deeds

Shine through the darkness of the ages.

Their graves, like hills in springtime, bloom.

Potemkin’s work will be inscribed.

Gavrili Derzhavin, The Waterfall

The next day, the body was solemnly returned to Jassy for post-mortem and embalming. The dissection was carried out in his apartments in the Ghika Palace.^*1 Slicing open the soft and majestic belly, Dr Massot and his assistants examined the organs and then extracted them one by one, feeding out the entrails like a hose-pipe.¹ They found the innards were very ‘wet’, awash with bilious fluid. The liver was swollen. The symptoms suggested a ‘bilious attack’. There were the inevitable rumours of poisoning, but there was not the slightest evidence. It is most likely that Potemkin was weakened by his fever, whether typhus or malaria, haemorrhoids, drinking and general exhaustion, but these did not necessarily kill him. His earaches, phlegm and difficulties in breathing mean he probably died of bronchial pneumonia. In any case, the stench of the bile was unbearable. Nothing, not even the embalming process, could cleanse it.²

The doctors embalmed the body: Massot sawed a triangular hole in the back of the skull and drained the brains out of it. He then filled the cranium with aromatic grasses and potions to dry and preserve the famous head. The viscera were placed in a box, the heart in a golden urn. The corpse was sewn up again like a sack and then dressed in its finest uniform.

All around it, chaos reigned. Potemkin’s generals argued about who was to command the army. Everything – a body, a fortune, the imperial love letters, the war and peace of an empire – awaited the reaction of the Empress.³ When the news reached St Petersburg just seven days later, the Empress fainted, wept, was bled, suffered from insomnia and went into seclusion. Her secretary recorded her days of ‘tears and desperation’, but she calmed herself by writing a panegyric to Potemkin’s

excellent heart…rare understanding and unusual breadth of mind; his views were always broadminded and generous; he was extremely humane, full of knowledge, exceptionally kind and always full of new ideas; nobody had such a gift for finding the right word and making witty remarks. His military qualities during this war must have struck everyone as he never failed on land or sea. Nobody on earth was less led by others…In a word, he was a statesman in both counsel and execution.

But it was their personal relationship she most cherished: ‘He was passionately and zealously attached to me, scolding me when he thought I could have done better…his most precious quality was courage of heart and soul which distinguished him from the rest of humanity and which meant we understood each other perfectly and left the less enlightened to babble at their leisure…’. It is a fine and just tribute.

She awoke weeping again the next day. ‘How can I replace Potemkin?’, she asked. ‘Who would have thought Chernyshev and other men would outlive him? Yes I am old. He was a real nobleman, an intelligent man, he did not betray me, he could not be bought.’ There were ‘tears’ and ‘tears’ again.⁴ Catherine mourned like a member of Potemkin’s family. They wrote to one another: consolation by graphomania. ‘Our grief is universal,’ she told Popov, ‘but I’m so raw I can’t even talk about it.’⁵ The nieces, travelling to Jassy for the funeral, felt the same. ‘My father is dead and I am rolling tears of grief,’ wrote his ‘kitten’ Katinka Skavronskaya to Catherine. ‘I became accustomed to rely on him for my happiness…’. She had just received a loving letter from him when the news of her ‘orphanage’ arrived.⁶ Varvara Golitsyna, whom Potemkin had loved so passionately right after Catherine, remembered, ‘he was so tender, so gracious, so kind to us’.⁷

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Business had to go on. Indeed Catherine, with the selfishness of monarchs, grumbled about the inconvenience as well her grief: ‘Prince Potemkin has played me a cruel turn by dying! It is me on whom all the burden now falls.’⁸ The Council met the day the news arrived, and Bezborodko was despatched to Jassy to finish the peace talks. In Constantinople, the Grand Vizier encouraged Selim III to start the war again, while the foreign ambassadors rightly told him peace was more likely now that the future King of Dacia was dead.⁹

Catherine ordered ‘Saint’ Mikhail Potemkin to fetch her letters from Jassy and sort out the Prince’s labyrinthine finances. But the imperial letters were the holiest relics of Potemkin’s legacy. Mikhail Potemkin and Vasily Popov argued over them.¹⁰ The latter insisted on handing them over himself. So Mikhail¹¹ left without them.^*2

The murky question of the fortune, however, took twenty years and three emperors to settle and was never unravelled. Since 1783, it seems Potemkin had received a total of 55 million roubles – including 51,352,096 roubles and 94 kopecks from the state to pay his armies, build his fleets and construct his cities, and almost 4 million of his own money. His spending of millions could not be accounted for.^*3 Emperor Paul restarted the investigation, but his successor Alexander, who had danced at Potemkin’s ball, gave up the impossible task and the subject was finally closed.¹²

Petersburg talked of nothing but his mythical personal fortune – millions or just debts? ‘Although his legacy was considerable, especially the diamonds,’ Count Stedingk told Gustavus III, ‘one guesses that when all the debts are paid, the seven heirs will not have much left.’¹³ Catherine was also interested: she could have left his debts for his heirs, which would have used up the entire fortune, said to be worth seven million roubles, but she understood that Potemkin had used the Treasury as his own bank, while spending his own money for the state – it was impossible to differentiate. ‘Nobody knows exactly what the deceased left,’ wrote the unprejudiced Bezborodko, arriving in Jassy. ‘He owes a lot to the Treasury but the Treasury owes a lot to him.’ Furthermore, the Court banker Baron Sutherland died at almost the same time as his patron, exposing a financial scandal which was potentially dangerous to Russia’s fragile credit. Potemkin owed Sutherland 762,785 roubles¹⁴ – and a total in Petersburg alone of 2.1 million roubles.¹⁵

Catherine settled the money with her characteristic generosity, buying the Taurida Palace from his heirs for 935,288 roubles plus his art collection, his glass factory, a million roubles of diamonds and some estates. She paid off the debts herself and left the bulk of the fortune to be divided among seven greedy and now very wealthy heirs, a selection of Engelhardts and Samoilovs. In Smila alone, they each received 14,000 male souls, without even counting the Russian lands, yet they were still arguing over the swag a decade later.¹⁶ Even two centuries later, in Soviet times, the villagers of Chizhova were digging up the churchyard in the quest for Potemkin’s lost treasure.

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The Empress ordered that social life in Petersburg should cease. There were no Court receptions, no Little Hermitages. ‘The Empress doesn’t appear.’¹⁷ Some admired her grief: Masson understood that ‘it was not the lover she regretted. It was the friend whose genius was assimilated to her own.’¹⁸ Stedingk thought Catherine’s sensibilité was greater praise of the Prince than any panegyric.¹⁹ The capital was draped in a ‘veneer of mourning’, but much of it concealed jubilance.²⁰

While the lesser nobility and junior officers, whose wives wore his medallion round their necks, mourned a hero, some of the old noble and military establishment celebrated.²¹ Rostopchin, who thought Zubov ‘a twit’, was nonetheless ‘charmed’ that everyone so quickly forgot the ‘fall of the Colossus of Rhodes’.²² Grand Duke Paul is supposed to have muttered that the Empire now boasted one less thief – but then Potemkin had kept him from his rightful place for almost twenty years. Zubov, ‘without being triumphant’, was like a man who could finally breathe ‘at the end of a long and hard subordination’.²³

However, three of the most talented men in the Empire, two of them supposedly his mortal enemies, regretted him. When Field-Marshal Rumiantsev-Zadunaisky, natural son of Peter the Great, heard the news, his entourage expected him to celebrate. Instead, he knelt in front of an icon. ‘What’s so surprising?’, he asked his companions. ‘The Prince was my rival, even my enemy, but Russia has lost a great man…immortal for his deeds.’²⁴ Bezborodko admitted he was ‘indebted’ to ‘a very rare and exquisite man’.²⁵ Suvorov was sad, saying Potemkin was ‘a great man and a man great, great in mind and height: not like that tall French ambassador in London about whom Lord Chancellor Bacon said that “the garret is badly furnished” ’, but he was simultaneously ‘the image of all earthly vanity’. Suvorov felt the heroic age was finished: Potemkin had used him as his own King Leonidas of Sparta. He twice went to pray at Potemkin’s tomb.²⁶

In Jassy, Engelhardt asked the peasant–soldiers if they preferred Rumiantsev or Potemkin. They acclaimed Rumiantsev’s ‘frightening but energetic’ record, but the Prince ‘was our father, lightened our service, supplied us with all we needed; we’ll never have a commander like him again. God make his memory live forever.’²⁷ In Petersburg, soldiers wept for him.²⁸ Even malicious Rostopchin admitted that Potemkin’s Grenadiers were crying – though he said it was because they had lost ‘the privilege of stealing’.²⁹ Bezborodko heard the soldiers mourning Potemkin. When he quizzed them about the deprivations of Ochakov, they usually replied, ‘But it was necessary at the time…’ and Potemkin had treated them with humanity.³⁰ But the best tributes are the marching songs about Potemkin which the soldiers sang in the Napoleonic Wars.

Here rests not famed by war alone

A man whose soul was greater still

Gavrili Derzhavin, The Waterfall

The Prince’s outrageous personality aroused such emotions in his lifetime and afterwards that it obscured any objective analysis of his achievements and indeed has distorted them grotesquely. His enemies accused him of laziness, corruption, debauchery, indecision, extravagance, falsification, military incompetence and disinformation on a vast scale. The sybaritism and extravagance are the only ones that are truly justified. Even his enemies always admitted his intelligence, force of personality, spectacular vision, courage, generosity and great achievements. ‘It cannot be denied’, wrote Catherine’s earliest biographer Castera, ‘that he had the mind and courage and energy which, with the gradual unfolding of his talents, fitted him for a prime minister.’ Ligne believed that, in making Potemkin, Nature had used ‘the stuff she would usually have used to create a hundred men.’³¹

As a conqueror and colonizer, he ranks close to his hero Peter the Great, who founded a city and a fleet on the Baltic as Potemkin created cities and a fleet on the Black Sea. Both died at fifty-two. There the similarities end, for Potemkin was as humane and forgiving as Peter was brutal and vengeful. But the Prince can be understood and therefore appreciated only in the light of his unique, almost equal partnership with Catherine: it was an unparalleled marriage of love and politics. At its simplest, it was a tender love affair and a noble friendship, but that is to ignore its colossal achievements. None of the legendary romances of history quite matches its exuberant political success.

The relationship enabled Potemkin to outstrip any other minister–favourite and to behave like a tsar. He flaunted his imperial status because he had no limits, but this made him all the more resented. He behaved eccentrically because he could. But his problems stem from the unique ambiguity of his situation, for, though he had the power of a co-tsar, he was not one. He suffered, as all favourites do, from the belief that the monarch was controlled by an ‘evil counsellor’ – hence his first biography was called Prince of Darkness. If he had been a tsar, he would have been judged for his achievements, not his lifestyle: crowned heads could behave as they wished but ersatz emperors are never forgiven for their indulgences. ‘The fame of the Empire was increased by his conquests,’ says Ségur, ‘yet the admiration they excited was for her and the hatred they raised was for him.’³²

Serenissimus was a dynamic politician but a cautious soldier. He was slowly competent in direct command, but outstanding as supreme strategist and commander-in-chief on land and sea: he was one of the first to co-ordinate amphibious operations on different fronts across a vast theatre. He was blamed for the fact that the Russian army was chaotic and corrupt, faults as true today as they were two centuries ago, but he deserves credit for its achievements too. When Bezborodko³³ reached the army in 1791, for example, he was amazed at the order he found there, despite what he had heard. Nor were his adversaries as weak as they became: the Turks several times defeated the Austrians, who were supposedly much more competent than the Russians. Overall, Potemkin has been underestimated by military history: he should be upgraded from the ranks of incompetent commanders to those of the seriously able, though second to contemporary geniuses like Frederick the Great, Suvorov or Napoleon. As Catherine told Grimm, he delivered only victories. Few generals can boast that. In the tolerance and decency he showed to his men, Potemkin was unique in Russian history, even today in the age of the Chechen War. ‘No man up to that time,’ wrote Wiegel, ‘had put his power to less evil ends.’

Thirty years later, the Comte de Langeron, whose prejudiced accounts of Potemkin did as much damage to his reputation as those of Ligne and Helbig, admitted, ‘I judged him with great severity, and my resentment influenced my opinions.’ Then he judged him justly:

Of course he had all the faults of courtiers, the vulgarities of parvenus, and the absurdities of favourites but they were all grist to the mill of the extent and force of his genius. He had learnt nothing but divined everything. His mind was as big as his body. He knew how to conceive and execute his wonders, and such a man was necessary to Catherine. Conqueror of the Crimea, subduer of the Tartars, transplanter of the Zaporogians to the Kuban and civilizer [of the Cossacks], founder of Kherson, Nikolaev, Sebastopol, establisher of shipyards in three cities, creator of a fleet, dominator of the Black Sea…all these marvellous policies should assure him of recognition.

Alexander Pushkin, who befriended Langeron in Odessa in 1824, agreed that Potemkin was ‘touched by the hand of history…We owe the Black sea to him.’³⁴ Cities, ships, Cossacks, the Black Sea itself, and his correspondence with Catherine, remain his best memorials.

Derzhavin was moved to compose his epic The Waterfall soon after Potemkin’s death. It catches many sides of the Maecenas and Alcibiades that the poet knew. He uses the waterfall itself – its magnificence, speed, natural power – to symbolize Potemkin as well the turbulence of life and its transitory nature. Potemkin was one of imperial Russia’s most remarkable statesmen in a class only with Peter the Great and Catherine herself. The Duc de Richelieu, that fine judge of character and himself a statesman, was the foreigner who best understood Serenissimus. ‘The sum of his great qualities’, he wrote, ‘surpassed all his faults…Nearly all his public actions bear the imprint of nobility and grandeur.’³⁵

The dust of Alcibiades! -

Do worms dare crawl about his head there?

Gavrili Derzhavin, The Waterfall

The Empress decided that the Prince’s funeral should be held in Jassy. Potemkin had asked Popov to bury him in his village of Chizhova, but Catherine believed he belonged in one of his cities,³⁶ Kherson or Nikolaev.³⁷ It was strange that she did not bury him in Petersburg, but perhaps that rationalist child of the Enlightenment did not ascribe great importance to graves. She was much more interested in the places and people they shared when he was alive. Besides, she knew that the further from the capital the body of Potemkin rested, the less Paul could degrade it after her death.

On 11 October, Potemkin’s body was placed in a hall, probably in the Ghika Palace, for his lying-in-state: the catafalque was enclosed in a chamber of black velvet, trimmed with silver tassels and held up by silver cords. The dais was decorated in rich gold brocade. He lay in an open coffin upholstered with pink velvet, covered by a canopy of rose and black velvet, supported by ten pillars and surmounted by ostrich feathers. Potemkin’s orders and batons were laid out on velvet cushions and on two pyramids of white satin which stood on either side of the coffin. His sword, hat and scarf lay on its lid. Nineteen huge candles flickered, six officers stood guard. Soldiers and Moldavians cried about ‘their lost protector’ and filed past the coffin. In front of this magnificent mise-en-scène was a black board inscribed with Potemkin’s titles and victories.^*4

At 8 a.m. on 13 October, the Ekaterinoslav Grenadiers and Dnieper Musketeers lined the streets through which the procession was to pass. The cannons fired salutes and the bells rang dolefully as the coffin was borne out by generals, along with the canopy carried by Life-Guards. A squadron of Hussars and then Cuirassiers led the way. The horses were led by stablemen in rich liveries tied with black crêpe. Then 120 soldiers in long black mantles bore torches, thirty-six officers held candles. Next there were the exotic Turkish costumes of the boyars of Moldavia and the princes of the Caucasus. After the clergy, two generals carried the trappings of power. The miniature diamond-encrusted portrait of Catherine which he always wore was more telling than all the medals and batons.

The black hearse, bearing the coffin, harnessed to eight black-draped horses, led by postillions in long black cloaks and hats, clattered through the streets followed by the Prince’s nieces. His Cossacks brought up the rear.

The procession approached the rounded corner bastions of the Golia Monastery and passed through the fortified thirty-metre-high gate-tower. The coffin was carried into the Church of the Ascension, once visited by Peter the Great. The mixture of Byzantine, Classical and Russian architecture in its white pillars and spires was Potemkin’s own. Cannons fired a final salute.³⁸

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The loss of Potemkin left a gap in Catherine’s life that could never be filled: after Christmas, she stayed in her room for three days without emerging. She talked about him often. She ordered the 101-gun salute for the Peace of Jassy and held the celebration dinner – but she tearfully and curtly waved away any toasts. ‘Her grief was as deep as it was before.’ On 30 January 1792, when Samoilov delivered the text of the treaty, she and Potemkin’s nephew wept alone.³⁹ When she came back from Tsarskoe Selo that summer, she told everyone that she was going to live at Potemkin’s house, which she named the Taurida after him, and she stayed there frequently. She loved that palace and often walked alone in its gardens, as if she was looking for him.⁴⁰ A year later, she wept copiously on his birthday and the anniversary of his death, crying alone in her room all day. She visited the Taurida Palace with her grandsons and Zubov in attendance. ‘Everything there used to be charming,’ she told Khrapovitsky, ‘but now something’s not quite right.’ In 1793, she kept returning to the Taurida: sometimes she arranged to stay there secretly after dinner. ‘No one’, wrote Khrapovitsky,⁴¹ ‘could replace Potemkin in her eyes,’ but she surrounded herself with Potemkin’s circle.

Popov, already one of her secretaries, now became the living embodiment of the Prince’s political legacy. Indeed, Popov had only to say that Potemkin would not have approved for Catherine to refuse even to contemplate a proposal. Such was the power of a dead man. When she came to the Taurida Palace, Popov fell to his knees and thanked her for deigning to live in the house of his ‘creator’. Samoilov became procurator-general on the death of Prince Viazemsky. Ribas founded Odessa at Hadjibey as ordered by Potemkin, but Richelieu, as governor-general of New Russia, made it into one of the most cosmopolitan ports of the world. In 1815, Richelieu became prime minister of France.

Two years after Potemkin’s death, the Prince de Ligne recalled him to Catherine as ‘my dear and inimitable, lovable and admirable’ friend. Ligne himself never recovered from not being given command of an army and even begged Metternich to let him take part in Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812 – an unworthy repayment of Catherine’s and Potemkin’s generosity. He survived to become the aged ornament of the Congress of Vienna and managed his final epigram before expiring at the age of seventy-nine: ‘Le Congrès’, he said, ‘ne marche pas; mais il danse’.⁴² The Comte de Ségur adapted to the French Revolution to become Napoleon’s grand master of ceremonies, advised the Emperor not to invade Russia in 1812, and then emerged as a peer under the Restoration. Nassau-Siegen tried to persuade Napoleon to let him attack British India but died in 1806 in Prussia.

Francisco de Miranda became ‘El Precursor’ to the Liberator of South America, after serving as a general in the French Revolutionary armies. In 1806, he landed on the Venezuelan coast with 200 volunteers, then had to withdraw again. But in 1811 Simon Bolivar persuaded him to return as commander-in-chief of the Venezuelan patriot army. An earthquake and military defeats made the indecisive Dictator negotiate with the Spanish. When he tried to flee, Bolivar arrested him and handed him over to the Spanish. That lover of liberty died in 1816 in a Spanish prison – thirty years after meeting Serenissimus. Sir James Harris was created Earl of Malmesbury, and Talleyrand called him the ‘shrewdest minister of his time’. Sir Samuel Bentham became inspector-general of Navy Works and was responsible for building the fleet that won Trafalgar. Jeremy Bentham actually built a Panopticon prison, backed by George III, but the experiment failed. He blamed this on the King.

John Paul Jones was commissioned by Washington and Jefferson to defeat the Algerian pirates of the Barbary Coast, but he died in Paris on 7/18 July 1792 aged just forty-five and was given a state funeral. He became revered as the founder of the US Navy. His grave was lost until 1905, when General Horace Porter discovered Jones well preserved in a lead coffin. In an example of necro-imperialism, President Theodore Roosevelt sent four cruisers to bring Jones home and on 6 January 1913, thousands of miles and 125 years after parting with Potemkin, he was reburied in a marble sarcophagus, based on Napoleon’s at Invalides, at the Naval Academy at Annapolis, where he now rests.⁴³

Catherine saw Branicka as Potemkin’s emotional heir, granting her Potemkin’s apartments in the imperial palaces so they could spend time together, but specifying that Sashenka should be served by different servants because the faces of Potemkin’s old retainers would break her heart.⁴⁴ Catherine promoted Platon Zubov to many of Potemkin’s posts, but he proved himself direly inadequate for any position.⁴⁵ Many missed Serenissimus when they contemplated the insolent mediocrity of the Zubovs – ‘the rabble of the Empire’.⁴⁶

Catherine, encouraged by Potemkin, had almost certainly planned to disinherit the ‘unstable’ Grand Duke Paul and pass the Crown directly to her grandson Alexander. Without Potemkin, she probably did not have the will to do it.⁴⁷ On 5 November 1796, Catherine II rose at the usual time. She withdrew into her privy closet where she was struck down by a massive stroke. So, like George II of England, she was taken ill at a moment that unites kings and commoners. After her valet and maid had broken open the door, they bore her into her bedchamber where Dr Rogerson bled her. She was too heavy to lift on to the bed, so they laid her on a mattress on the floor. Emissaries galloped out to Gatchina to inform Grand Duke Paul: when they arrived, he thought they had come to arrest him. He set off for Petersburg. Some time in the afternoon, it is said, he and Bezborodko destroyed documents that suggested passing over Catherine’s son. On 6 November, Catherine died at 9.45 p.m., still on the mattress on the floor.

Paul I reversed as many of the achievements of his mother’s reign as possible. He avenged himself on Potemkin by making the Taurida Palace into the Horse-Guards’ barracks and the Winter Garden their stables. Potemkin’s library was childishly ‘exiled’ to Kazan, a unique example of bibliographic vengeance. He ordered the renaming of Gregoripol. He brought back the Prussian paradomania of his father, treating Russia like a barracks, and did his best to destroy the tolerant ‘army of Potemkin’ that he so hated.⁴⁸ His brand of despotic inconsistency united against him the same elements that had overthrown Peter III. So Paul’s haunting fear of assassination became self-fulfilling. (Platon Zubov was one of his assassins.) Though Potemkin’s Cossacks remained as pillars of the Romanov regime, Paul’s sons, Alexander I and Nicholas I, enforced the same Prussianized paradomania that remained the face of the monarchy for the rest of its history: the ‘knouto-Germanic Empire’ is what the anarchist Bakunin called it.⁴⁹

Sophie de Witte married the richest ‘kinglet’ of Poland, Felix Potocki, whom she hooked in Jassy after Potemkin’s death. Sophie embarked on a passionately incestuous affair with her stepson Yuri Potocki, committing ‘all the crimes of Sodom and Gomorrah’. When Langeron visited her, she told him, ‘You know what I am and whence I come, eh bien, I cannot live with just 60,000 ducats of revenue.’ Four years after her old husband died in 1805, she threw out the son and built up a fortune while raising her children. Countess Potocka died ‘honoured and admired’ in 1822.⁵⁰

Sashenka Branicka, on the other hand, retired to her estates and became so rich she could not count it. ‘I don’t know exactly,’ she said, ‘but I should have about twenty-eight million.’ She lived majestically and almost royally into a different era. The witness of Potemkin’s last breath became the ‘bearer of his glory’. She kept her lithe, slender figure and fresh complexion into middle age but always wore those long Catherinian dresses, held in at the waist with a single wide buckle. She created a shrine to Potemkin at her estate and was painted with his bust behind her. Alexander I visited her twice and appointed her grand mistress of the Court. Even twenty years after Catherine’s death, Wiegel was amazed to observe the grandest noblewomen kissing her hand as if she were a grand duchess, which she seemed to accept ‘without the slightest unease or embarrassment’. Swathes of the Polish and Russian aristocracy were descended from her children by the time she died aged eighty-four in 1838, when Victoria was Queen of England.⁵¹

Potemkin’s ‘angel’, Countess Skavronskaya, was liberated by the death of her melomaniac husband and married an Italian Knight of Malta, Count Giulio Litta, for love.⁵² Tatiana, the youngest niece, Mikhail Potemkin’s widow, married the much older Prince Nikolai Yusupov, the descendant of a Tartar khan named Yusuf and said to maintain a whole village of serf–whores. Princess Yusupova was unhappily married but, like her uncle, amassed jewels that included the earrings of Marie-Antoinette, the Polar Star diamond and the diadem of Napoleon’s sister, Caroline Murat, Queen of Naples. Felix Yusupov, who killed Rasputin in 1916, was proud of his connection to Serenissimus.⁵³

Two great-nieces complement Potemkin’s life. Branicka’s daughter Elisabeth, known as Lise, married Prince Michael Vorontsov, the son of Potemkin’s enemy Simon, who brought him up in England as a dry, phlegmatic milord. He became viceroy of New Russia and the Caucasus like his wife’s great-uncle. Lise was said to have inherited the secret certificate of Potemkin’s marriage to Catherine and tossed it into the Black Sea – an appropriate home for it. ‘Milord’ Vorontsov found it impossible to control his flirtatious, exquisitely mannered Princess. She was already involved in a secret affair with one of her Raevsky cousins, when in 1823 she met Alexander Pushkin, who had been exiled to Odessa. Her Potemkin connection was surely part of the attraction to the poet: he knew Potemkin’s nieces and noted down the stories they told. He fell in love with Princess Vorontsova. The poet hinted in his poems that they made love on a Black Sea beach. She was believed to be the inspiration for the women in many of his poems, including Tatiana in Eugene Onegin. In his poem ‘The Talisman’ he wrote, ‘There where the waves spray, The feet of solitary reefs…A loving enchantress, Gave me her talisman.’ The gift was a ring engraved in Hebrew.

Vorontsov ended the affair by sending Pushkin away. The poet avenged this by writing doggerel that mocked Vorontsov and (probably) by fathering his daughter Sophie, born to Lise nine months after Pushkin’s departure. Thus the blood of Potemkin and Pushkin was fused. Pushkin was wearing her ‘talisman’ when, in 1837, he was killed in a duel.⁵⁴

Skavronskaya’s daughter, also Ekaterina, became a European scandal. Known as the ‘Naked Angel’ because of her fondness for wearing veil-like, transparent dresses and ‘le Chat Blanc’ – the ‘White Pussycat’ – for her sensual avidity, she married the heroic general Prince Peter Bagration. Like her mother, who was Potemkin’s ‘angel’, her face had a seraphic sweetness, her skin was alabaster, her eyes were a startling blue and her hair was a cascade of golden locks. She became Metternich’s mistress in Dresden in 1802 and bore him a daughter, Clementine, who was thus related to both Potemkin and the ‘Coachman of Europe’. Goethe saw her at Carlsbad and raved about her as she began another affair with Prince Louis of Prussia. After Bagration’s death at the Battle of Borodino, she flaunted herself and dabbled in European politics at the Congress of Vienna in 1814. She competed ruthlessly with the Duchess of Sagan for the favours of Tsar Alexander I: each occupied different wings of the Palais Palm. The Austrian policemen who spied on her bedroom in Vienna reported on her superb ‘practical expertise’. The White Pussycat then moved to Paris, where she was famous for her promiscuity, fine carriage and Potemkin diamonds. In 1830, she married an English general and diplomat Lord Howden. Touchingly, when she visited the old Metternich thirty-five yeas later in his exile in Richmond, his daughter remembered that she could barely stop laughing because the old ‘Angel’ was still ludicrously wearing the see-through dresses that had once enraptured the princes of Europe. She lived until 1857, but her daughter Clementine, who was brought up by the Metternichs, died young.⁵⁵

Finally, Sophia, Samoilov’s daughter, married Count Bobrinsky’s son, so that the blood of Catherine, the Orlovs and the Potemkins was also fused.⁵⁶

The 1905 Revolution was heralded in Odessa by the mutiny of sailors of the Battleship Prince Potemkin of Taurida. This spawned Eisenstein’s film: the very name Potemkin, fostered by tsarist autocracy, thus became the symbol of Bolshevism.^*5 The Richelieu Steps in Odessa were renamed the ‘Potemkin Steps,’ so the statue of the French Duke today looks down the steps named after the ‘extraordinary man’ he so admired.

The Taurida Palace was to be ‘the birthplace, the citadel and the burial ground of Russian democracy’.^*6 On 6 January 1918, the Constituent Assembly, the first truly democratic parliament in Russian history until 1991, met, watched by Lenin and a horde of drunk Red Guards, for the first and last time in the Colonnade Hall where Potemkin had fallen to his knees before Catherine. Lenin left, the Red Guards threw out the parliamentarians and the Taurida was locked up.⁵⁷ Today, the Palace houses the Commonwealth of Independent States, so the residence of the man who brought many of these lands into the Russian Empire is now the home of its disintegration.⁵⁸

And of course the phrase ‘Potemkin Village’ entered the language.

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Not all the body of Potemkin arrived in Kherson on 23 November 1791. When great men were embalmed their viscera were buried separately. The resting place of the heart was especially significant. Earlier that year, for example, the heart of Mirabeau had been carried through the streets of Paris at his state funeral in a leaden box covered in flowers.⁵⁹

Potemkin’s viscera were said to be buried in the Church of the Ascension at the Golia Monastery in Jassy. There was no apparent sign of it in the church, but through the centuries of the Kingdom of Rumania, Communism and now democracy a few intellectuals knew that it rests in a golden box under the carpet and flagstone before the Hospodar of Moldavia’s red-velvet medieval throne. So the brain that had conceived the Kingdom of Dacia lay beneath the portrait of a bearded Moldavian Prince, Basil the Wolf, wearing a gold, white and red kaftan and a bonnet with three feathers.⁶⁰

Potemkin’s family had not forgotten the place of the Prince’s death in the hills of Bessarabia, marked by the lance of Cossack Golavaty.⁶¹ Samoilov had a small, square Classical pillar built there in 1792, with the date and event engraved on its sides: its design and white stone is so similar to the fountain built at the Nikolaev palace that it must be by the same architect, Starov himself. Later, in the early nineteenth century, Potemkin’s heirs erected a pyramid ten metres high in dark stone with steps rising up to it.^*7

When the body reached Kherson, it was not buried, simply laid in an unsealed, specially constructed tomb in a crypt⁶² in the middle of St Catherine’s Church. The Empress ordered a noble marble monument to be designed and erected over the tomb, but by the time she died, five years later, the marble was still not ready. So the Prince, a parvenu who was somehow royal, remained interred but somehow unburied.⁶³ Visitors and locals, including Suvorov, prayed there.

In 1798, Paul heard about these visits and decided to avenge himself on the body: it irritated him all over again that Potemkin was still managing to defy tradition and decency seven years after his death. So he issued a decree on 18 April to Procurator-General Prince Alexander Kurakin: the body was unburied and, ‘finding this obscene, His Majesty orders that the body be secretly buried in the crypt in the tomb designed for this and the crypt should be covered up by earth and flattened as if it had never been there’. For a man of Potemkin’s stature to be buried without trace was bad enough. The Emperor allegedly ordered Kurakin orally to smash any memorial to Potemkin and to scatter the bones in the nearby Devil’s Gorge. Under cover of darkness, the tomb was filled in and covered up, but no one knew whether the officers had obeyed Paul’s orders. Had the bones been tossed into the Gorge, buried secretly in a pauper’s grave or taken away by Countess Branicka?⁶⁴ For a long time, no one was sure.⁶⁵

In another midnight grave opening, on 4 July 1818, the Archbishop of Ekaterinoslav, Iov Potemkin, a cousin of Serenissimus, lifted the church floor, opened the coffin and discovered that the embalmed cadaver was still there after all. So it turned out that, in this as in so much else, the despotic whims of Emperor Paul were fudged by his officers. But they had obeyed him in making it look as if there was nothing there. Iov Potemkin was said to have placed some artefact from the grave in his carriage when he left: was this an act of familial and episcopal grave-robbing? Or was it the urn containing a special part of the body? Was the Prince still there after the Archbishop’s tinkering?⁶⁶

Every nocturnal burrowing sowed more doubts. But that is the trouble with secrecy, darkness and graves. In 1859 yet another official commission decided to open the grave to prove that the Prince was still there: when they opened the tomb, they discovered a large crypt, a wooden coffin inside a lead one and a gold fringe to go round it. Milgov, a local bureaucrat, tidied up the crypt and closed it again.⁶⁷

Now that everyone was finally sure there was a grave there, it was decided there should be a grandiose gravestone. But no one could recall where exactly the tomb had been, so they did not know where to put it. This sounds like a poor excuse for some more digging by inquisitive busybodies. In 1873, another commission excavated and found the wooden coffin containing a skull with the triangular hole in the back left by Massot’s embalming, and tufts of dark-blonde hair, the remnants of the coiffure that was said to be finest in Russia, as well as three medals, clothes and gold-braid scraps of uniform. They sealed it up again and constructed a fitting gravestone approximately above the tomb.⁶⁸ Finally, Potemkin, if it was he, was allowed some peace.

Then came the Revolution: the Bolsheviks gleefully dug up the graveyard of St Catherine’s that contained the bodies of officers killed in the siege of Ochakov. There are yellowed photographs, kept by the local priest today, that show a macabre revolutionary scene; crowds of peasants in the clothes of 1918 point at the wizened skeletons still with hair, wearing the braided tailcoats, breeches and boots of Catherine’s era – while in the background we can spot the jackboots and leather coats of the Chekist secret police.⁶⁹

Twelve years later, in 1930, a young writer named Boris Lavrenev returned to his hometown of Kherson to visit his sick father. He went for a walk through the fortress and saw a sign outside St Catherine’s that read ‘Kherson’s Anti-Religious Museum’. Inside he saw a pyramidal glass case. There was ‘a round brown thing’ inside it. When he got closer, he saw it was a skull. On the table next to it was written: ‘The skull of Catherine II’s lover Potemkin’. In the next-door case there was a skeleton, still with shrivelled muscles on the bones. A sign read: ‘The Bones of Catherine II’s lover Potemkin’. In the third case, there were remains of a green velvet jacket, white satin trousers and rotten stockings and shoes – Potemkin’s clothes.

Lavrenev rushed out of the church and sent a telegram to the ministry in charge of protecting art. When he was back in Leningrad, a friend wrote to tell him that the ‘museum’ was closed. Potemkin was gathered up, put in a new coffin in the vault and bricked up again. ‘So in 1930 in Kherson,’ wrote Lavrenev, ‘Field-Marshal Serenissimus Prince Grigory Alexandrovich Potemkin, who was the exhibit of the Kherson Anti-Religious Museum, was buried for the second time.’⁷⁰

On 11 May 1984, the mystery of Potemkin once again proved irresistible to local bureaucrats: the chief of Kherson’s Forensic Medical Department L.G. Boguslavsky opened the tomb and found ‘31 human bones…belonging to the skeleton of a man, probably of 185 cm…of about 52–55 years old’ who had probably been dead for about 200 years. But there were apparently some epaulettes in the coffin too, said to belong to a British officer of the time of the Crimean War. The coffin was more modern, but it had a Catholic as well as an Orthodox cross on it. The analysts decided this was undoubtedly Potemkin.

In July 1986, Boguslavsky wrote to Professor Evgeny Anisimov, the distinguished eighteenth-century scholar, who was unconvinced by the evidence: if it was Potemkin, why a Catholic cross on the coffin and why the British epaulettes? Were they concluding that this was Potemkin out of wishful thinking instead of forensic analysis? Quite apart from the fascinating question of the identity of the British officer whose uniform was found there, was it Potemkin or not?

The size, age and dating of the body were right. The old coffins, leaden, gilded or wooden, as well as the medals, any remaining icons and the clothes, all disappeared in the Revolution. The Catholic coffin, which was shorter than the skeleton, was probably supplied in 1930. The English epaulettes are from another grave, the relics of the ignorant Bolshevik pilfering. So, in 1986, the Prince of Taurida was once again buried for, if one counts the viscera of Jassy and all the other excavations, the eighth time – and again forgotten.⁷¹

St Catherine’s Church is now again filled with worshippers. The first thing one sees if one peers from the outside between Starov’s Classical pillars is a wooden and iron rail around a solitary flat white marble gravestone, seven foot long and three wide, that lies right in the middle underneath the cupola. Inside, beneath a large gilded crest set on the stone, one reads:

Field Marshal

Serenissimus Prince

Grigory Alexandrovich

Potemkin of Taurida

Born 30th September 1739

Died 5th October 1791.

Buried here 23rd November 1791

Around the edge of the marble there are seven gilded rosettes, each engraved with his victories and cities.^*8 An old lady is selling candles at the door. Potemkin? ‘You must wait for the priest, Father Anatoly,’ she says. Father Anatoly, with long straight blond hair, blue eyes and the tranquillity of clergy in provincial towns, represents a new generation of young Orthodox brought up under Communism and he is most pleased to show a foreigner the tomb of Potemkin. No one has opened the tomb for a few years and no foreigner has ever seen it.

Father Anatoly lights six candles, walks to the middle of the floor and opens a concealed wooden trapdoor. The steep steps fall away into darkness. Father Anatoly leads the way and uses the wax to stick the first candle to the wall. This lights up a narrow passageway. As he walks along he fixes other candles to illuminate the way until he reaches a small chamber: it was once lined with icons and contained the silver, lead and wooden coffins of Potemkin, ‘all stolen by the Communists’. The simple wooden coffin, with a cross on it, stands on a raised dais in the midst of the vault. The priest sticks the remaining candles around the chamber to light it up. Then he opens the lid of the coffin: there is small black bag inside containing the skull and the numbered bones of Prince Potemkin. That is all.

There is one final mystery: the heart. It was not buried at Golia like the entrails and brains but was placed in a golden urn. But where was it taken? Samoilov said it was placed under the throne of St Catherine’s in Kherson, but Father Anatoly says there is no trace of it. The likeliest scenario for the heart is that it this was the object removed by Archbishop Iov Potemkin in 1818. Where did he take it – Branicka’s estate or Chizhova, where Serenissimus asked to be buried? Today, the villagers of Chizhova still believe the heart of Potemkin was buried there in the family church where he learned to sing and read.

This would be most fitting: the Empire, which Serenissimus did so much to build, is in ruins today and most of Potemkin’s conquests are no longer Russian. If his innards are in Rumania and his bones in Ukraine, it seems right that his heart rests in Russia.

Roar on, roar on, O waterfall!

Gavrili Derzhavin, The Waterfall

Skip Notes

*1 It is now appropriately Iaşi University’s School of Medicine, though others say the autopsy was conducted in the Cantacuzino Palace.

*2 Mikhail Potemkin died strangely in his carriage on his way home from Jassy. His brother Count Pavel Potemkin was later accused of murdering and robbing a Persian prince when he was viceroy of the Caucasus: he wrote a poem pleading his innocence, then died of a fever. Some said he committed suicide.

*3 The almost 4 million of his ‘private’ income sounds much too low considering Catherine regularly bought his palaces for sums like half a million roubles. The sums of State money were much more than the entire annual revenue of the whole Russian Empire, which usually oscillated between forty and forty-four million roubles – though it was rising fast.

*4 This disappeared a few years after Potemkin’s funeral. Two hundred years later in October 1998, the author, assisted by a Rumanian priest and two professors, began to search the Golia church in Jassy and found the board and its beautifully inscribed memorial under a piano behind a pile of prayer books: it was dusty but undamaged.

*5 Indeed George V was so worried that he banned the film from being shown to the schoolboys of Eton: ‘It is not good for the boys to witness mutinies, especially naval mutinies.’

*6 In 1906 the State Duma, Tsar Nicholas II’s reluctant concession to the 1905 Revolution, sat in what had been the Winter Garden. After the February Revolution, it housed for a while both the Provisional Government of Russia and the Petrograd Soviet.

*7 The site was lost and presumably destroyed: no one had recorded seeing this spot since the early nineteenth century. Unmarked on maps and unknown even to local academics, it survived only on a 1913 Austrian map, but it seemed unlikely that the monuments could exist today. Yet they are still there on a country lane on a Bessarabian hillside, known only by the local peasants who took the author to ‘Potemkin’s place’, which has survived Russian and Ottoman rule, the Kingdom of Rumania, annexation by Stalin in 1940, German occupation and its return to Rumania, re-inclusion in the Soviet Union and the creation of the independent Republic of Moldova.

*8 The top row reads ‘Ochakov 1788, Crimea and Kuban 1783, Kherson 1778’. The two in the middle: ‘Akkerman 1789’ and ‘Ekaterinoslav 1787’. At the bottom: ‘Bender 1789’ and ‘Nikolaev 1788’.