Prince of Princes -The Life of Potemkin

She was indeed a woman who took infinite pains to be a great empress and she had a Germanic attitude to wasting time: 'waste as little time as possible', she said. 'Time belongs, not to me, but to the Empire.'⁴⁷ One part of her genius was choosing talented men and getting the best out of them: 'Catherine had the rare ability to choose the right people,' wrote Count Alexander Ribeaupierre, who knew her and her top officials. 'History has justified her choices.'⁴⁸ Once they had been selected, she managed her men so adroitly that each of them 'began to think [what she proposed] was his own idea and tried to fulfil it with zeal'.⁴⁹ She was careful not to humiliate her servants: 'My policy is to praise aloud and scold in a low voice.'⁵⁰ Indeed many of her sayings are so simple and shrewd that they could be collected as a modern management guide.

In theory, the absolute power of the tsars received blind obedience in an empire without law - but Catherine knew it was different in practice, as Peter III and later her son Paul I never learned. 'It is not as easy as you think [to see your will fulfilled] ...', she explained to Potemkin's secretary, Popov. 'In the first place my orders would not be carried out unless they were the kind of orders which could be carried out... I take advice, I consult... and when I am already convinced in advance of general approval, I issue my orders and have the pleasure of observing what you call blind obedience. And that is the foundation of unlimited power.'⁵¹

She was polite and generous to her courtiers, kind and considerate to her servants, but there were sinister sides to her thorough enjoyment of power: she relished the secret powers of her state, reading the police reports, then chilling her victims like any dictator by letting them know that they were being watched. Years later, the young French volunteer Comte de Damas, alone in his room watching some troops parade past the window on their way to fight the Swedes, muttered, 'If the King of Sweden were to see those soldiers ... he'd make peace.' Two days later, when he was paying his court to the Empress, 'she put her lips close to my ear and said, "So you think if the King of Sweden were to inspect my Guards, he'd make peace?" And she began to laugh.'⁵²

Her charm did not fool everyone: there was some truth in the barbs of the priggish Prince Shcherbatov, who served at Court, when he described this 'considerable beauty, clever, affable', who 'loves glory and is assiduous in pursuit of it'. She was 'full of ostentation ... infinitely selfish'. He claimed: 'True friendship has never resided in her heart and she is ready to betray her best friend ... her rule is to cajole a man as long as he is needed and then in her own phrase "to throw away a squeezed-out lemon".'⁵³ This was not exactly so, but power always came first. Potemkin was the one exception who proved the rule.

As a gentleman of the bedchamber, Potemkin now spent much of his time around the imperial palaces performing his duties, which included standing behind her chair at meals to serve her and her guests. This meant that he saw the Empress frequently in public, getting to know the routine of her life. She took an interest in him - and he began to take a reckless interest in her that was not necessarily fitting for such a junior courtier.

PART TWO

Closer 1762-1774

4

CYCLOPS

Nature has made Grigory Orlov a Russian peasant and he will remain thus until the end.

Durand de Distroff

When the Empress and the Second Lieutenant of the Horse-Guards encountered each other in the hundreds of corridors of the Winter Palace, Potemkin would fall to his knees, take her hand and declare he was passionately in love with her. There was nothing unusual about them meeting one another in such a way, because Potemkin was a gentleman of the bedchamber. Any courtier might literally have bumped into his Sovereign somewhere in the Palace - they saw her every day. Indeed, even members of the public could enter the Palace, if they were decently dressed and not wearing livery. However, Potemkin's conduct - kissing Catherine's hands on bended knee and declaring his love - was rash, not to say careless. It can only have been saved from awkwardness by his exuberant charm - and her flirtatious acquiescence.

There were probably several young officers at Court who believed them­selves in love with her - and many others who would have pretended to be for the sake of their careers. A long list of suitors, including Zakhar Cher- nyshev and Kirill Razumovsky, had fallen in love with Catherine over the years and accepted her gentle rebuttals. But Potemkin refused to accept either the conventions of the courtier or the dominance of the Orlovs. He went further than anyone else. Most courtiers were wary of the brothers who had murdered an emperor. Potemkin flaunted his courage. Long before he was in power, he disdained the hierarchies of court. He teased the secret police chief. Magnates treated Sheshkovsky circumspectly but Potemkin is said to have laughed at the knout-wielder, asking: 'How many people are you knout- beating today?'¹

He could not have behaved like this before the Orlovs without some encouragement from the Empress. She could easily have stopped him if she had wished. But she did not. This was unfair of her for there could be no prospect of Catherine accepting Potemkin as a lover in 1763/4. She owed her throne to the Orlovs. Potemkin was still too young. So Catherine could not have taken him seriously. She was in love with Grigory Orlov and, as she later told Potemkin, she was a creature of habit and loyalty. She regarded the dashing but not particularly talented Orlov as her permanent companion and 'would have remained for ever, had he not been the first to tire'.² Nonetheless she seemed to recognize that she enjoyed a special empathy with Potemkin. So did the Gentleman of the Bedchamber who contrived to meet her as much as he could during the routine of her days.

Catherine arose daily at 7 a.m., but, if she woke earlier, she lit her own stove so as not to wake her servants. She then worked until eleven on her own with her ministers or her cabinet secretaries, sometimes giving audiences at 9 a.m. She wrote furiously in her own hand - she herself called it 'graphomania' - to a wide variety of correspondents, from Voltaire and Diderot to the Germans Dr Zimmerman, Madame Bielke and later Baron Grimm. Her letters were warm, outspoken and lively, laced with her slightly ponderous sense of humour.³ This was the age of letter-writing: men and women of the world took a pride in the style and the content of their letters. If they were from a great man in an interesting situation - a Prince de Ligne or a Catherine the Great or a Voltaire - they were copied and read out in the salons of Europe like a cross between the despatches of a distinguished journalist and the spin of an advertising agency.⁴ Catherine liked writing, and not just letters. She loved drafting decrees - ukase - and instructions in her own hand. In the middle 1760s, she was already writing her General Instruction for the Great Commission she was to call in 1767 to codify existing laws. She copied out large portions of the books she had studied since adolescence, especially Beccaria and Montesquieu. She called this her 'legislomania'.

At 11 a.m. she did her toilette and admitted those whom she knew best into her bedroom, such as the Orlovs. They might then go for a walk - if it was summer, she loved to stroll in the Summer Palace gardens where members of the public could approach her. When Panin arranged for Casanova to meet her,⁵ she was accompanied only by Grigory Orlov and two ladies-in-waiting. She dined at 1 p.m. At 2.30 p.m. she returned to her apartments, where she read until six, the 'lover's hour', at which time she entertained Orlov.

If there was a Court evening, she then dressed and went out. Dress at Court was a long coat for men a la Frangaise and for ladies a gown with long sleeves and a short train and whalebone bodice. Partly because it suited Russian wealth and flamboyance and partly because it was a court that needed to advertise its legitimacy, both men and women competed to wear diamonds on anything where they could be attached - buttons, buckles, scabbards, epaulettes and often three rows on the borders of hats. Both sexes wore the ribbons and sashes of the five orders of Russian chivalry: Catherine herself liked to wear the ribbon of St Andrew - red edged with silver studded with diamonds - and St George over one shoulder with the collars of St Alexander Nevsky, St Catherine and St Vladimir and two stars - St Andrew and St George - on her left breast.⁶ Catherine inherited the lavishness of dress from the Elisabethan Court. She enjoyed splendour, appreciated its political uses and she was certainly not remotely economical, but she never approached Elisabeth's sartorial extravagance, later toning down the magnificence. She understood that too much glitter undermines the very power it is meant to illustrate.

While the Guards patrolled outside the palaces, the Sovereign's own apart­ments were guarded by an elite force, founded by Catherine in 1764 and made up of nobles - the sixty men of the Chevaliers-Gardes - who wore blue coats faced with red covered in silver lace. Everything from bandolier to carbine was furnished in silver, even their boots. On their heads they wore silver helmets with high plumes. The Russian eagle was embroidered on their backs and adorned the silver plates of armour on arms, knees and breast, fastened by silver cords and silver chains.⁷

On Sunday evenings there was a court; on Mondays a French comedy; on Thursdays, there was usually a French tragedy and then a ballet; on Fridays or Saturdays there was often a fancy-dress masquerade at the Palace. Five thousand guests attended these vast and semi-public fetes. Catherine and her Court displayed their magnificence to the foreign ambassadors and to each other. What better guide to such an evening than Casanova? 'The ball went on for sixty hours ... Everywhere I see joy, freedom and the great profusion of candles ...'. He heard a fellow masked guest say: 'There's the Empress ... you will see Grigory Orlov in a moment; he has orders to follow her at a distance ...'. Guests pretended not to recognize her. 'Everyone recognized him because of his great stature and the way he always kept his head bent forward.' Casanova the international freeloader ate as much as he could, watched a contredance quadrille executed perfectly in the French style and then, naturally being who he was, met an ex-mistress (now kept by the Polish Ambassador) whose delights he rediscovered. By this point, he had long since lost sight of the Empress.⁸

Catherine enjoyed dressing up and being masked. On one occasion, dis­guised as an officer in her pink domino (loose cloak) and regimentals, she recorded some of her slightly erotic conversations with guests who genuinely did not recognize her. One princess thought her a handsome man and danced with her. Catherine whispered, 'What a happy man I am,' and they flirted. Catherine kissed her hand; she blushed. 'Please say who you are,' asked the girl. 'I am yours,' replied Catherine, but she would not identify herself.⁹

Catherine seldom ate much in the evening and virtually always retired by 10.30 p.m., accompanied by Grigory Orlov. She liked to be asleep by eleven.¹⁰ Her disciplined routine formed the public world of Court, but Potemkin's wit had won him access to its private world. This brought him closer to the vigilant, violent Orlovs, but it also gave him the chance to let the Empress know how passionately he felt. Potemkin would pay dearly for his reck­lessness.

In the early evenings, Catherine invited an inner circle of about eighteen to her apartments and later to the extension of the Winter Palace that she called her Little Hermitage. Her habitues included Countess Bruce, that attractive fixer whom Catherine trusted in the most private matters; the Master of Horse, Lev Naryshkin, whom she called her 'born clown',¹¹ the epitome of the rich and frivolous Russian nobleman; the Orlovs of course - and, increasingly, among others, Potemkin.

The Russian Court was much less stiff and formal than many in Western Europe, including that of George III. Even when Catherine received ministers who were not part of her private coterie, they sat and worked together, not like British Prime Ministers, who had to stand in George Ill's presence unless he granted them the rare privilege of sitting. In Catherine's Little Hermitage, this casualness went even further. Catherine played cards - whist or faro usually - until around 10 p.m. Guardsmen like Orlov and Potemkin were instantly at home, since they had spent much of their youth sitting at the green baize tables. They also took part in word and paper games, charades and even singsongs.

Grigory Orlov was the master of the salon: Catherine gave her lover the rooms above her own in the Winter Palace so that he could descend the green staircase without being announced. While Catherine took a prim view of risque jokes in her inner circle, she was open in her displays of affection with Orlov. A visiting Englishman later recorded, 'they did not forbear their caresses for his presence'.¹² Orlov adored music and his good humour set the tone of these evenings, when the Empress herself almost became one of a circle of friends. 'After dinner,' the Court Journal recorded on one evening, 'Her Imperial Majesty graciously returned to her inner apartments, and the gentlemen in the card room themselves sang songs, to the accompaniment of various wines; then the Court singers and servants ... and, on the orders of Count G. G. Orlov, the NCOs and soldiers of the guard at Tsarskoe Selo, sang gay songs in another room.'¹³

The Orlovs had achieved their ambitions - up to a point. While the marriage was now a dead letter, Orlov was the Empress's constant companion, which in itself gave him influence. But it was certainly she who ran the government. There was a fault in the design of the Orlovs as a political force: the brains, the brawn and the charm were not united in one man but were distributed with admirable fairness among the five brothers. Alexei Orlov, Le Balafre, had the ruthlessness; Fyodor the culture and political savvy; while Grigory, who needed all of the above, possessed only handsomeness, a wonderful nature and solid good sense.

Diplomats claimed Orlov, 'having grown up in alehouses and places of ill- repute, ... led a life of a reprobate though he was kind and good-hearted'.

It was said that 'all his good qualities' were 'overshadowed by a licentiousness' that 'turned the Royal Court into a den of debauchery. There was hardly a single maiden at Court... not subjected to his importunings,'¹⁴ alleged Prince Shcherbatov, the self-appointed moral conscience of the Russian aristocracy.¹⁵ 'The favourite', wrote the British envoy, Sir Thomas Gunning, 'is dissipated ...' and kept low company. As the 1760s went on, Catherine either ignored his infidelities like a worldly wife or did not know of them. Orlov however was not as simple as foreign diplomats claimed, but nor was he an intellectual or a statesman: he corresponded with Voltaire and Rousseau but probably to please Catherine and because it was expected of a cultured grandee of that time.

Catherine never overpromoted Orlov, who was to have only two big jobs: straight after the coup, he was appointed to head the Special Administration for Foreigners and Immigrants in charge of attracting colonists to the empty regions of the approaches to the Black Sea and the marches of the northern Caucasus. There he performed energetically and laid some of the foundations for Potemkin's later success. In 1765, she appointed him Grand Master of Ordnance, head of the artillery, though it is significant that she felt the need to consult Panin, who advised her to scale down the powers of that position before giving it to him. Orlov never mastered the details of artillery and 'seemed to know less about them than a schoolboy', according to the French diplomat Durand, who met him at military exercises. Later he rose heroically to the challenge of fighting the Moscow Plague.¹⁶

Orlov swaggered around in Catherine's wake, but he did not exert himself in exercising power and was never allowed the political independence she later delegated to Potemkin. While physically intimate with the Empress, Orlov was semi-detached from actual government.

Potemkin was in a hurry to display his insolent cleverness before the Empress, whose informality gave him plenty of scope to do so. On one occasion, he carelessly wandered up to the salon where Grigory Orlov was playing cards with the Empress. He leaned on the card table and started looking at Orlov's cards. Orlov whispered that he should leave, but Catherine intervened. 'Leave him alone,' she said. 'He's not interrupting us.'¹⁷

If the Orlovs decided to get rid of Potemkin, it was Nikita Panin who intervened at this 'dangerous time' to save him from whatever the Orlovs were planning.¹⁸ Late in the summer of 1762, Potemkin was given his first - and last - foreign assignment: to travel to Stockholm to inform Count Ivan Osterman, the Russian Ambassador to Sweden, of the change of regime.¹⁹ The Russian Court traditionally treated Sweden as a cooling area for over­heated lovers. (Panin himself and Catherine's first lover Serge Saltykov had been despatched there for similar reasons.) From the patchy evidence that we have of his early career, it seems that the irrepressible Potemkin had learned nothing from this shot across his bows and kept playing the fool in front of the Orlovs until he had to be taught a lesson.

On his return, Catherine remained as interested as ever in this original young friend. Potemkin, whom she later called her 'pupil', benefited from this generosity of spirit. On duty as gentleman of the bedchamber, he was sitting opposite the Empress at table when she asked him a question in French. He replied in Russian. When a courtier told him off for such rudeness, Potemkin exclaimed: 'On the contrary, I think a subject should answer in the language in which he can best express his thoughts - and I've been studying Russian for twenty-two years.'²⁰ This was typical of his flirtatious imper­tinence but also of his defiance of the Gallomania of many courtiers. There is a legend that Catherine suggested he improve his French and arranged for him to be taught by a defrocked French priest named Chevalier de Vivarais, who had served under Dupleix at Pondicherry in India during the Seven Years War. This seedy mountebank was no chevalier and travelled with a 'wife' called Vaumale de Fages who apparently made a pleasurable contribution to Potemkin's French lessons. The name has a courtesan's ring to it: doubtless she was a most patient teacher. Vivarais was the first of a long line of sophisticated crooks whose company Potemkin enjoyed. As for French, it became his second language.²¹

Catherine charted a special government career for her young protege. She knew his religious interests well enough to appoint Potemkin assistant to the Procurator of the Holy Synod, the council created by Peter the Great to run the Orthodox Church. The Procurator was administrator and judge in all matters religious - the equivalent of the Procurator-General in secular matters. The Empress cared enough about him to draft his instructions herself. Entitled 'Instruction to our Gentleman of the Monarch's Bedchamber Grigory Pot­emkin', and dated 4 September 1763, her first letter to him, which shows the maternal tone she favoured with younger men, reads:

From the ukase given about you to the Holy Synod: though you know well why you have been appointed to this place, we are ordering the following for the best fulfilment of your duty ... 1. For better understanding of the affairs run from this place ... 2. it will be useful for you to make it a rule to come to the Synod when they are not sitting ... 3. To know the agenda in advance ... 4. You will have to listen with diligent attention...

Point six decreed that, in the event of the Procurator-General's illness, 'you will have to report to us all business and write our orders down in the Synod. In a word, you will have to learn all things which will lighten the course of business and help you to understand it better.'²² Potemkin's first period in the Synod was short, possibly because of his problems with the Orlovs, but we know from Decree 146 of the Synod's records that he attended the Synod on a day-to-day basis during September.²³ He was on the rise.

While paying court to the Empress and beginning his political career, Potemkin did not restrict himself. Alcibiades won himself a reputation as a lover. There was no reason why he should be loyal to Catherine while Orlov was in possession of the field. Potemkin's stalwart but uninspiring nephew, Alexander Samoilov, recorded his uncle as paying 'special attention' to a 'certain well­born young girl' who 'was not indifferent towards him'. Infuriatingly he added: 'whose name I will not reveal'.²⁴ Some historians believe this was Catherine's confidante Countess Bruce, who was to gain notoriety as the supposed 'eprouveuse'²⁵ who 'tried out' Catherine's lovers. Countess Bruce unselfishly did all she could to help Potemkin with Catherine: in that worldly court, there was no better foundation for a political alliance than an amorous friendship. Certainly Countess Bruce always found it hard to resist a young man. But the Countess was already thirty-five, like Catherine - hardly the 'girl', who remains mysterious.²⁶

Whoever it was, Catherine let Potemkin continue his melodramatic role as her cavalier servente. Was he really in love with Catherine? There is no need to over-analyse his motives: it is impossible in matters of love to separate the individual from the position. He was ambitious and was devoted to Cath­erine - the Empress and the woman. Then he suddenly disappeared.

Legend has it that sometime that year Grigory and Alexei Orlov invited Potemkin for a game of billiards. When he arrived, the Orlovs turned on him and beat him up horribly. Potemkin's left eye was damaged. The wound became infected. Potemkin allowed a village quack - one Erofeich - to bind it up, but the peasant remedy he applied only made it worse. The wound turned septic and Potemkin lost his eye.²⁷

Potemkin's declarations to Catherine and the fight with the Orlovs are both part of the Potemkin mythology: there are other accounts that he lost the eye playing tennis and then went to the quack, whose ointment burned it. But it is hard to imagine Potemkin on a tennis court. The fight story was widely believed, because Potemkin was overstepping the limits of prudence by court­ing Catherine, but it is unlikely that it really happened because Grigory Orlov always behaved decently to his young rival.

This was his first setback - however it occurred. In two years he had gone from arriving poor and obscure from Moscow to being the indulged protege of the Empress of all the Russias herself. But he had peaked far too early. Losing the sight in his eye was tragic, but ironically his withdrawal from Court made strategic sense. This was the first of many occasions when Potemkin used timely withdrawals to concentrate the mind of the Empress.

Potemkin no longer visited Court. He saw no one, studied religion, grew a long beard and considered taking the tonsure of a monk. He was always prone to religious contemplation and mysticism. This true son of the Ortho­dox Church often retired to monasteries to pray. While there was always play-acting in his antics, his contemporaries, who attacked him whenever possible, never doubted that he was genuinely tempted by a life of prayer. Nor did they doubt his ascetic and very Russian disgust with the pursuit of worldly success, particularly his own.²⁸ But the crisis was much more serious than that. Some of Potemkin's charm derived from the wild giddiness of his mood swings, the symptom of a manic personality that explains much of his strange behaviour. He collapsed into a depression. His confidence was shattered. The breakdown was so serious that some accounts even claim that he put his eye out himself 'to free it from the blemish which it derived from the accident'.²⁹

There was vanity in his disappearance too: his blind eye was certainly half closed - but not lost.[14] He was ashamed of it and probably believed that the Empress would now be disgusted by him. Potemkin's over-sensitivity was one of his most winning qualities. Even as a famous statesman, he almost always refused to pose for portraits because he felt disfigured. He convinced himself that his career was over. Certainly his opponents revelled in his ruined looks: the Orlovs nicknamed him after the one-eyed giants of Homer's Odyssey. 'Alcibiades', they said, had become the 'Cyclops'.

Potemkin was gone for eighteen lost months. The Empress sometimes asked the Orlovs about him. It is said she even cancelled some of her little gatherings she so missed his mimicry. She sent him messages through anonymous lady- friends. Catherine later told Potemkin that Countess Bruce always informed her that he still loved her.³° Finally, according to Samoilov, the Empress sent this message through the go-between: 'It is a great pity that a person of such rare merits is lost from society, the Motherland and those who value him and are sincerely well disposed to him.'³¹ This must have raised his hopes. When Catherine drove by his retreat, she is said to have ordered Grigory Orlov to summon Potemkin back to Court. The honourable and frank Orlov always showed respect for Potemkin to the Empress. Besides he probably believed that, with Potemkin's looks ruined and his confidence broken, he was no longer a threat.³²

Suffering can foster toughness, patience and depth. One senses that the one-eyed Potemkin who returned to Court was a different man from the Alcibiadean colt who left it. Eighteen months after losing his eye, Potemkin still sported a piratical bandage round his head, which suggest the con­tradictions of shyness and showmanship that were both part of his personality. Catherine welcomed him back to Court. He reappeared in his old position at the Synod; and when Catherine celebrated the third anniversary of the coup by presenting silver services to her thirty-three leading supporters, Potemkin was remembered near the bottom of the list, far below grandees like Kirill Razumovsky, Panin and Orlov. The latter was firmly and permanently at her side, but she had obviously not forgotten her reckless suitor.³³

So the Orlovs devised a more agreeable way to remove him. One legend tells how Grigory Orlov suggested to the Empress that Kirill Razumovsky's daughter, Elisabeth, would be a most advantageous match for the Guardsman from Smolensk and Catherine did not object.³⁴ There is no evidence of this courtship but we know that Potemkin later helped the girl - and always got on well with her father who 'received him like a son.'

Indeed the Count's kindness to young Potemkin was typical of the lack of snobbery of this Cossack ex-shepherd who was one of the most likeable of Catherine's magnates. It was said Razumovsky had been a peasant at sixteen and a Field-Marshal at twenty-two, which was almost true.[15] Whenever his sons, who grew up to be proud Russian aristocrats, were embarrassed by his humble Cossack beginnings, he used to shout for his valet: 'Here, bring me the peasant's rags in which I came to St Petersburg. I want to recall the happy time when I drove my cattle crying, "Tsop! Tsop!".'³⁵ He lived in fabulous state - he was said to have introduced champagne to Russia. Potemkin, who certainly enjoyed the sparkling stories (and probably the sparkling wine) of this cheerful raconteur, became obsessed by the Cossacks: did the enthusiasm of a lifetime start over the ex-Hetman's champagne at the Razumovsky Palace? The real reason there would be no marriage was that Potemkin still loved Catherine and that she held out some sort of glorious hope for the future.³⁶ Catherine 'has at times had eyes for others', wrote the British envoy, the Earl of Buckinghamshire, 'particularly for an amiable and accomplished man, who is not undeserving of her affection; he has good advisers and is not without some chance of success.'³⁷ The 'accomplishment' makes him sound like Potemkin and his 'good advisers' could not be any better placed than Countess Bruce.

In 1767, he received a job that again showed how Catherine was specially creating tasks that suited his interests. After a short tenure at the Synod, she had given him duties as an army paymaster and responsibilities for the manufacturing of daytime army uniforms. Now Catherine was embarking on the most daring political experiment of her life: the Legislative Commission. Potemkin, who had evidently showed off his knowledge of Oriental cultures, was appointed one of three 'Guardians of Exotic Peoples'³⁸ alongside the Procurator-General Prince Viazemsky and one of Catherine's secretaries, Olsufiev. The Empress was gently introducing Potemkin to the most important officials in the realm. Nothing was ever a coincidence with Catherine II.

The Legislative Commission was an elected body of about 500 delegates from an impressively broad range (for its day) of representatives of the nobility, townspeople, state peasants and non-Russian peoples. They con­verged that year on Moscow bearing the instructions of their electors. There were fifty-four non-Russians - from Tartars to Baskirs, Yakuts to Kalmyks. Since Viazemsky and Olsufiev had weightier tasks, they were Potemkin's responsibility.

Potemkin went on ahead of the Empress to Moscow with two squadrons of Horse-Guards to help oversee the arrival of the delegates. Catherine herself followed in February, setting off from Moscow on a cruise down the Volga as far as Kazan and Simbirsk, with a suite of over 1,500 courtiers, including two Orlovs and two Chernyshevs, and foreign ambassadors - a voyage designed to show that Catherine was feeling the pulse of her Empire. She then returned to Moscow to open the Commission.

Catherine may have considered abolishing or reforming serfdom, according to the tenets of the Enlightenment, but she was far from wanting to overturn the Russian political order. Serfdom was one of the strongest links between the throne and the nobility: she would break it at her peril. The 500 or more articles of her Great Instruction, which she wrote out herself, were a digest of a lifetime of reading Montesquieu, Beccaria and the Encyclopaedia. The Commission's aim was the codification of existing laws - but even that was a risky encroachment on her own autocracy. Far from a revolutionary, she was a believer in Russian absolutism. Indeed most of the philosophes them­selves, those enemies of superstition, were not democrats, just advocates of reason, law and order imposed from above. Catherine was sincere, but there was an element of window-dressing, for it showed her confidence and Russia's stability. But it turned out to be a very long-winded advertisement.

At 10 a.m. on Sunday, 30 July 1767, Catherine, in a coach drawn by eight horses and followed by sixteen carriages of courtiers, was escorted from Moscow's Golovin Palace to the Kremlin by Grigory Orlov and a squadron of Horse-Guards, probably including Potemkin. Grand Duke Paul followed. At the Cathedral of the Assumption, she dismounted for a service of blessing. She was followed by the Procurator-General Viazemsky and all the delegates - Russians and exotics - who marched behind, two by two, like the passengers on Noah's Ark. The non-Christian delegates waited outside the church. Then all walked in the same order to the Great Kremlin Palace to be received by their Empress in imperial mantle and crown, standing before the throne, accompanied by Grand Duke Paul, courtiers and bishops. On her right were displayed copies of her Great Instruction. The next morning in the Kremlin's Faceted Palace, the Empress's Instruction was read and the Commission opened in a ceremony based on the English opening of Parliament, with its similar speech from the throne.³⁹

Potemkin escorted the Empress when she attended some of the Com­mission's sessions. He would have read the Instruction: his vast library later contained every work Catherine used - Montesquieu's Esprit des lois, all thirty-five volumes of Diderot's Encyclopaedia (in French) and tomes of Voltaire. But he did not take the floor.⁴⁰ The Commission itself did not succeed in codifying the laws, but instead became a talking shop. It did succeed in collecting useful information for Catherine's future legislation. The Com­mission also coined the sobriquet 'Catherine the Great', which she refused. Her stay reminded Catherine how much she disliked Moscow so she returned to Petersburg, where she re-convened the Commission in February 1768. The coming of war finally gave her the excuse to end its ponderous deliberations.⁴¹ On 22 September 1768 Potemkin was promoted from Kammerjunker to receive the ceremonial key of a Kamerherr - chamberlain⁴² of the Court. Unusually he was still to remain in the military, where he was promoted to captain of Horse-Guards. Then, two months later, he was removed from the army and attached to the Court full time on Catherine's specific orders. For once, Potemkin did not want to be at Court at all. On 25 September 1768, the Ottoman Empire declared war on Russia. Potemkin saw his chance.

5

THE WAR HERO

Attacked and out-numbered by the enemy, he was the hero of the victory...

Field-Marshal Count Peter Rumiantsev-Zadunaisky on General Potemkin

during the First Russo-Turkish War

'Your Majesty, The exceptional devotion of Your Majesty for the common good has made our Motherland dear to us,' wrote Potemkin to the Empress on 24 May 1769. The chivalry in this first surviving letter is framed to state his personal passion for her as explicitly as possible.

It is the duty of the subject to demand obedience to Your wishes from everyone. For my part, I have carried out my duties just as Your Majesty wishes.

I have recognized the fine deeds that Your Majesty has done for our Motherland, I have tried to understand your laws and be a good citizen. However, your mercy towards my person fills me with zeal for the person of Your Majesty. The only way I can express my gratitude to Your Majesty is to shed my blood for Your glory. This war provides an excellent opportunity for this and I cannot live in idleness.

Allow me now, Merciful Sovereign, to appeal at Your Majesty's feet and request Your Majesty to send me to Prince Prozorovsky's corps in the Army at the front in whatever rank Your Majesty wishes but without inscribing me in the list of military service for ever, but just for the duration of the war.

I, Merciful Sovereign, have tried to be qualified for Your service; I am especially inclined to cavalry which, I'm not afraid to say, I know in every detail. As regards the military art, I learned the main rule by heart: the best way to achieve great success is fervent service to the Sovereign and scorn for one's life ... You can see my zeal ... You'll never regret your choice.

Subject slave of Your Imperial Majesty, Grigory Potemkin.¹

The war was indeed the best way for Potemkin to break out of the frustrating routine of the Court and distinguish himself. But it was also to provoke the crises that made the Empress need him. The leaving of Catherine was, paradoxically, to bring him much closer to her.

The First Russo-Turkish War began when Russian Cossacks pursued the rebels of the Confederacy of Bar, a group of Poles opposed to King Stanislas- Augustus and Russian influence in Poland, over the Polish border into the small Tartar town of Balta on what was technically Turkish territory. There the Cossacks massacred Jews and Tartars. France encouraged the Sublime Porte - the Ottoman Government, already threatened by the recent extension of Russian power over Poland - to issue an ultimatum demanding that Russia withdraw from the Commonwealth altogether. The Turks arrested the Russian envoy to Istanbul, Alexei Obreskov, and locked him in the fortress of the Seven Towers, where Suleiman the Magnificent had kept his treasure but which was now a high-class prison, the Turkish Bastille. This was the trad­itional Ottoman way of declaring war.

Catherine reacted by creating a Council of State, containing her leading advisers, from Panin, Grigory Orlov and Kirill Razumovsky to two Golitsyn cousins and the two Chernyshev brothers, to help co-ordinate the war and act as a policy sounding-board. She also gave Potemkin what he wanted. 'Our Chamberlain Potemkin must be appointed to the army,' Catherine ordered her War Minister, Zakhar Chernyshev.² Potemkin headed straight for the army. Within a few days, as a major-general of the cavalry - the military rank equivalent to Court chamberlain - he was reporting to Major-General Prince Alexander Prozorovsky at the small Polish town of Bar.

The Russian army, nominally 80,000 strong, was ordered to win control of the Dniester river, the strategic waterway that flowed from the Black Sea into southern Poland. Access to, and control of, the Black Sea was Russia's ultimate objective. By fighting down the Dniester, Russian troops hoped to arrive on those shores. Russian forces were divided into two: Potemkin served in the First Army under General Prince Alexander Golitsyn aiming for the fortress of Khotin. The Second under General Peter Alexandrovich Rum- iantsev was ordered to defend the southern borders. If all went well in the first campaign, they would fight their way round the Black Sea coast, down the Pruth to the great Danube. If they could cross the Danube into the Turkish provinces of Bulgaria, they could threaten the Sublime Porte in its own capital, Constantinople.

The Empress was wildly overconfident. 'My soldiers are off to fight the Turks as if they were going to a wedding!', she boasted to Voltaire.³ But war is never a wedding - especially not for Russia's peasant-soldiers. Potemkin himself, whose sole experience of war was the swagger of the Guards life in Petersburg, arrived in the harsh and chaotic world of the real Russian army.

The life of a Russian conscript was so short that it often ended before he had even reached his camp. When they left home for their lifelong service (Potemkin later reduced it to twenty-five years), their families tragically wished them goodbye with laments and dirges as if they were already dead. The recruits were then marched away in columns, sometimes chained together. They endured a grim, brutal trauma, torn away from their villages and families. A modern historian rightly says this experience had most in common with the trans-Atlantic passage of negro slaves. Many died on thousand- verst marches, or arrived so weak at their destination that they soon perished: the Comte de Langeron, a Frenchman in Russian service later that century, estimated that 50 per cent of these recruits died. He graphically described the sadistic regime of beatings and discipline that was designed to keep these serf-soldiers from rebelling against their serfmaster-officers - though it may have been no worse than the cruelty of the Prussian army or the Royal Navy. Like the negro slaves, the Russian soldiers consoled themselves in their own colourful, sacred and warm culture: they earned only 7 roubles 50 kopecks a year (a premier-major's salary was 300 roubles), while Potemkin, for example, hardly a rich man, had received 18,000 roubles just for his part in the coup. So they shared everything in the soldiers' commune - the artel - that became their village, church, family, club, kitchen and bank, all rolled into one.⁴ They sang their rich repertoire of songs 'for five or six hours at a stretch without the slightest break'⁵ (and were later to sing many about Potemkin).

The Russian conscript was already regarded as 'the finest soldier in the world', wrote Langeron. 'He combines all the qualities which go to make a good soldier and hero. He is as abstemious as the Spaniard, as enduring as a Bohemian, as full of national pride as an Englishman and as susceptible to impulse and inspiration as French, Walloons, or Hungarians.'⁶ Frederick the Great was impressed and terrified by Russian courage and endurance during the Seven Years War and coined a word to describe their maniacal ursine savagery - 'les oursomanes'.⁷ Potemkin served in the cavalry, which had earned its own reputation for bloody bravery, especially since it fought beside Russia's ferocious irregular light cavalry, the Cossacks.

The Russian army was unique in Europe because, until the American and French Revolutions, armies drilled and fought for kings but not for ideas or nations. Most armies were made up of many nationalities - mercenaries, unwilling recruits and riffraff - who served a flag, not a country. But the Russian army was filled with Russian peasants who were recruited in mass 1еиёез from the roughly seven million souls available. This was seen as the reason for their almost mindless bravery.⁸

The officers, either Russian landowners addicted to gambling and debauch, or German, or later, French soldiers of fortune, were notoriously cruel: General Mikhail Kamensky, an extreme example, actually bit his soldiers. But they were also extraordinarily brave.⁹ The characteristics of their peasant chair du cannon - brutality, discipline, self-sufficiency, endurance, patriotism and stoicism in the face of appalling suffering - made the Russian army a formidable fighting force. 'The Turks are tumbling like ninepins,' went the

Russian saying; 'but, through the grace of God, our men stand firm, though headless.'¹⁰

Some contemporaries believed that war in the eighteenth century was become less bloody. Certainly, the dynasties of Europe, Habsburgs and Bour­bons, at least pretended to fight according to the rules of aristocratic etiquette. But, for the Russians, wars against the Turks were different. After the centuries in which the Moslem Tartars, and then Turks, had threatened Orthodox Russia, the Russian peasant regarded this as a crusade. Havoc - the medieval giving of no quarter - was the order of battle.

Potemkin had only just arrived in Bar when the phoney war, giving both the unprepared Turks and Russians time to amass their forces, ended abruptly. On 16 June 1769, some 12,000 Tartar horsemen, under the command of the Crimean Khan, the Sultan's ally, who were raiding the Russian Ukraine, crossed the Dniester and attacked Potemkin's camp. Even then, the Tartars, armed with lassos and bows and arrows, were a vision from another age but they were the only Turkish forces ready for war. The Tartar Khan, Kirim Giray, a direct descendant of Genghis Khan, was an aggressive and fearless cavalry commander. He was accompanied by Baron de Tott, a French officer seconded to Istanbul to improve the Turkish forces. He has left his account of this medieval expedition - the last of its kind. Five hundred years after Genghis Khan, the Crimean Tartars, the descendants of those Mongol hordes, were still Europe's finest horsemen. As they swept out of the Crimea through the Ukraine and towards the Russian troops still stationed in southern Poland, they must have looked and sounded as terrifying as their Mongol ancestors. Yet, like most of the irregular cavalry, they were undisciplined and usually too distracted by booty to be much strategic use. But the raid bought the Turks time to build up their armies, which were said to be 600,000 strong.

In his first battle, Potemkin engaged these wild Tartar and Turkish horsemen and repulsed them. He acquitted himself well, for 'Chamberlain Potemkin' appears in the list of those who distinguished themselves. This was the beginning of Potemkin's run of success. On 19 June, he fought again in the Battle of Kamenets and took part in further skirmishing, helping General Golitsyn take Kamenets.¹¹ In St Petersburg Catherine celebrated these minor engagements with а 'Те Deum' on Sunday, 19 July, but the vacillating Golitsyn faltered before Khotin. Furious and impatient, in August the Empress recalled him. There are hints that Potemkin, via the Orlovs, played some part in the intrigue that dispensed with Golitsyn.¹² But, if he was laughably slow, Golitsyn was at least lucky. He was opposed by a Grand Vizier, Mehmed Emin, who was happier reading Islamic poetry than slicing off heads. So Catherine was embarrassed when, before her orders had arrived at the front, Golitsyn pulled himself together and crossed the Dniester.

Major-General Potemkin and his cavalry was now in action virtually every day: he distinguished himself again on 30 June and repulsed Turkish attacks on 2 and 6 July. When Golitsyn finally recrossed the Dniester, Potemkin served at the taking of Khotin. He fought heroically with his cavalry on 14 August at the Battle of Prashkovsky and then helped defeat the Moldavanzi- Pasha on the 29th. 'I am immediately recommending the courage and skill shown in battle by Major-General Potemkin,' wrote Golitsyn, 'because until that time our cavalry has never acted with such discipline and courage as it did under the command of the Major-General.'¹³ Potemkin was becoming a war hero.

This praise must have been welcome to Catherine back in the capital. It was far from welcome at the Sublime Porte, where Sultan Mustafa III recalled his Grand Vizier: Emin-Pasha may have lost his mind at the front but, in Ottoman tradition, he lost his head as soon as he got home. These victories were too late for Golitsyn, however, who was consoled with a field-marshal's baton. The Foreign Minister's brother, General Peter Ivanovich Panin, assumed command of the Bender army, so that, in September, the First Army was taken over by Peter Rumiantsev. Thus began the command of one of the most glorious generals in the history of Russia, who became Potemkin's patron - and then his rival.

The new commander could not have been more different from the twenty- nine-year-old Major-General on his staff. Yet Potemkin respected him immensely. Aged forty-three, Rumiantsev was a tall, thin, fastidious soldier with a biting dry wit - and he was Countess Bruce's brother. Like his hero Frederick the Great, he 'loved and respected no one in the world', but was 'the most brilliant of all Russian generals, endowed with outstanding gifts'.¹⁴ Again like his hero, Rumiantsev was a severe disciplinarian yet a wonderful conversationalist. 'I've passed days with him tete-a-tete,' enthused Langeron, 'and never felt a moment's boredom.'¹⁵ He amassed a fortune and lived in 'ancient feudal magnificence', always displaying the most refined manners of a seigneur. This is unsurprising since he was a living specimen of Petrine history: he was probably Peter the Great's natural son.[16]

The general had learned his craft fighting Prussia in the Seven Years War, during which even Frederick admired his skill. Catherine appreciated his talent but never quite trusted him and appointed him President of the Little Russian College, a position worthy of his status, but safely distant from Court. He remained unimpressed by Catherine, liked the Russian army's Prussianized uniforms and wigs, believed in Prussian military discipline - and worked to improve on the Prussian tactics of the Seven Years War. He tended to prefer Germans to Russians.¹⁶

Rumiantsev was a father to his soldiers but a general to his sons. When one visited him after finishing his studies, he asked, 'Who are you?', 'Your son,' replied the boy. 'Yes, how pleasant. You have grown,' snapped the general. The son asked if he could find a position there and if he could stay. 'Certainly,' said his father, 'you must surely know some officer or other in the camp who can help you out.'¹⁷

Potemkin was always keen to have things both ways - access to the commander and the chance to find glory in the field; chamberlain at Court, general at the front. He wrote to Rumiantsev about 'the two things on which my service is founded ... devotion to my Sovereign and desire for approval from my highly respected commander'.¹⁸ Rumiantsev appreciated his intel­ligence but also must have known of his acquaintance with the Empress. His demands were granted. As the war entered its second year, Catherine was frustrated by the slowness of Russian success. War in the eighteenth century was seasonal: in the Russian winter, armies hibernated like hedgehogs. Battle with the main Ottoman armies - and the fall of Bender - had to wait for the spring.

As soon as it was possible, Rumiantsev reassembled his army in several manoeuvrable corps and advanced down the Dniester. Even in freezing January, Potemkin, now sent by Rumiantsev to serve with the corps of General Schtofel'n, was involved in skirmishes, driving off the attacks of Abdul-Pasha. On 4 February, Potemkin helped capture Jurja in a series of daring cavalry raids, defeating 12,000 enemy troops, capturing two cannons and a handful of banners. It was still bitterly cold but he 'did not spare himself'.¹⁹ At the end of the month, when Rumiantsev's report was read out at the Council before the Empress, he mentioned 'the fervent feats of Major-General Pot­emkin', who 'asked me to send him to the corps of Lieutenant-General von Schtofel'n where, as soon as was possible, he distinguished himself both by his courage and by martial skill.'²⁰ The commander recommended Potemkin should be decorated and he received his first medal, the Order of St Anna.

As the Russians marched south after the Turkish army, Potemkin, according to Rumiantsev's later report, 'protected the left bank with the troops entrusted to him and repulsed the enemy attacks against him'. On 17 June, the main army forded the Pruth to attack the 22,000 Turks and 50,000 Tartars encamped on the other bank. Meanwhile Major-General Potemkin and the reserves crossed the river three miles downstream and ambushed the Turkish rear. The camp disintegrated; the Turks fled.²¹

Just three days later, Rumiantsev advanced towards a Turkish army of 80,000, comfortably encamped where the River Larga joined the Pruth, while they awaited the arrival of the Grand Vizier and his main army.²²

Forming up into their squares, on 7 July 1770, Rumiantsev, Potemkin and the Russians stormed the Turkish camp, braced for the wild Turkish charges. This was Potemkin's first glimpse of an Ottoman army. It was an immense and impressive, noisy vision of silken tents and rickety carts, green banners and swishing horsetails (those Ottoman symbols of power) - sprawling, messy, alive with women and camp-followers and exotic uniforms, as much like a bazaar as an army. The Ottoman Empire was not yet the giant and flabby weakling it was to become in the next century. It was still capable of raising huge forces from its distant pashaliks, from the plains of Mesopotamia and the hills of Anatolia to the Barbary ports and the Balkans: all sent their cannon-fodder when the Sultan raised the banner of the Prophet.

The Turks, who pass for blockheads in the art of war, carry it out with a kind of method,' explained the Prince de Ligne later. The method was to amass teeming armies roughly in a pyramidal formation and then throw them upon the Russians forces in waves of charging cavalry and whooping infantry. Their Janissaries had once formed the most feared infantry in Europe. They were gradually degenerating into a rich and arrogant Praetorian Guard more interested in their trading posts and palace coups than fighting, but they were still proud of their prowess and Islamic fervour: they wore bonnets of red and gold with white shirts, billowing pantaloons and yellow boots and bore scimitars, javelins, muskets.

The best of the Ottoman cavalry were the Tartars and the Spahis, the feudal Turkish horsemen, who leaped on and off their horses to fire their muskets. They wore breastplates embedded with jewels or just bright waistcoats with pantaloons, often leaving their arms bare while bearing curved and engraved sabres, daggers, lances and gem-encrusted pistols. They were so indisciplined that they fought only when they were ready and often mutinied: it was quite common for Janissaries to steal horses and gallop off the battlefield, strike their officers or sell the army's food for private profit. The mass of the Ottoman armies were unpaid irregulars recruited by Anatolian feudal lords, who were expected to live by plunder. Despite the efforts of French advisers like Baron de Tott, their artillery was way behind that of the Russians and their muskets were outdated. If their marksmanship was admirable, their firing rate was slow.

They wasted much energy in obsolete display. When all was ready, this martial rabble of hundreds of thousands worked themselves up into a fever of religious outrage fuelled with drops of opium.²³ They advance', Potemkin later reminisced to the Comte de Segur, 'like an overflowing torrent.' He claimed their pyramidal formation was arranged in order of decreasing courage - the 'bravest warriors, intoxicated with opium', headed its apex while its base was formed of 'nothing but' cowards. The charge, recalled Ligne, was accompanied by 'frightful bowlings, the cries of Allah Allah'. It took a disciplined infantryman to hold his ground. Any captured Russian was instantly beheaded with a cry of 'Neboisse!' or 'Be not afraid!' - and the heads brandished on the end of pikes. Their religious fever 'increased in proportion to the danger'.

The Russians solved the problem of the momentum of the Turkish charge by using the square, which could withstand any shrieking onslaught. The Turk was both the 'most dangerous, and most contemptible, enemy in the world', wrote Ligne later, 'dangerous, if they are suffered to attack; con­temptible, if we are beforehand with them'. The Spahis or Tartars, 'humming around us like wasps', could envelop the Russian squares, 'curveting, leaping, caracoling, displaying their horsemanship and performing their riding-house croups' until they exhausted themselves. Then Rumiantsev's squares, drilled with Prussian precision, protected by their Cossacks and Hussars, and linked together by Jaegers, light, sharpshooting infantry, advanced. Once broken, the Turks either fled like rabbits or fought to the death. 'Dreadful slaughter', said Potemkin, was the usual result. 'The instinct of the Turks renders them dextrous and capable of all kinds of warlike employments ... but they never go beyond the first idea, they are incapable of a second. When their moment of good sense ... is over, they partake of the madman or the child.'²⁴

This was what happened when Rumiantsev's squares stormed the Turkish camp at the Battle of Larga, shrugging off the Turkish charges with stoical endurance and blasts of artillery. Seventy-two thousand Turks and Tartars were forced to evacuate their fortifications and flee. Potemkin, attached to Prince Nikolai Repnin's corps, commanded the advance guard that attacked the camp of the Crimean Khan and was, according to Rumiantsev, 'among the first to attack and capture its fortification'. Potemkin was again decorated, this time with the Order of St George, Third Class: he wrote to thank the Empress.²⁵

The new Grand Vizier now advanced with the main Turkish army to prevent the union of the two Russian armies of Rumiantsev and Panin. He crossed the Danube and marched up the Pruth to meet the fleeing troops from the Battle of Larga. On 21 July 1770, only slightly to the south of Larga, Rumiantsev marched his 25,000 troops towards the 150,000 men of the Grand Vizier's massed Turkish army, which had camped behind triple for­tifications near Lake Kagul. Despite the numerical inequality, he decided to attack. Using the lessons and confidence provided by Larga, he formed five squares facing the main Turkish positions. Potemkin and his cavalry defended the army's transport against 'the attacks of numerous Tartar hordes and prevented them from ... attacking the army's rear'. As he gave Potemkin this duty, Rumiantsev is supposed to have told him: 'Grigory Alexandrovich, bring us our provisions, balanced on the top of your sabre.'²⁶

The Turks, who had learned nothing from Larga, were completely sur­prised, fought savagely for the whole day but were finally routed in scenes of desperate carnage, leaving 138 guns, 2,000 prisoners, and 20,000 dead on the field. Rumiantsev brilliantly exploited his victory by pushing down towards the lower Danube: on 26 July Potemkin helped Repnin take the fortress of Izmail, then that of Kilia on 10 August. General Panin stormed Bender on 16 September, and Rumiantsev finally closed his campaign with the taking of Brailov on 10 November/⁷ There was one more magnificent piece of news.

Catherine had sent the Russian Baltic Fleet, proud creation of Peter the Great, across the North Sea, through the English Channel and the Straits of Gibraltar all the way to hit the Turkish rear in the eastern Mediterranean. Its admiral was Count Alexei Orlov, who had never been to sea, but its real lights were two Scottish officers, John Elphinstone and Samuel Greig. Despite Peter the Great's brave attempts to inspire sea-legs in Russian ploughmen, only the Livonians or Estonians took to the ocean. There were few Russian officers and most of them were lamentable. When Elphinstone grumbled, Catherine replied: 'The ignorance of the Russians is due to youth; that of the Turks to decrepitude.'²⁸ England helped the Russian expedition: London did not yet regard the Turk as a natural ally or the 'Bear' as a natural enemy. The 'Eastern Question' had not yet been asked. On the contrary, France was England's enemy, Turkey a French ally. By the time the leaky Russian fleet reached England, 800 sailors were ill. These seasick Russian peasants must have been an incongruously pathetic sight as they re-rigged, watered and recovered in Hull and Portsmouth.

After gathering at their base, Leghorn (Livorno) in Tuscany, Orlov's fleet finally reached Ottoman waters. It failed to raise a rebellion among the tricky Greeks and Montenegrins and then indecisively engaged the Turkish fleet off Chios. The Turks withdrew to the deceptive safety of Chesme harbour. Samuel Greig arranged a fiery lullaby for the sleeping Turks. Overnight on 25/26 June, his fireships floated into the harbour of Chesme. This 'ingenious ambuscade' turned the harbour into an inferno. 'Encumbered with ships, powder and artillery,' Chesme, wrote Baron de Tott, watching from the Turkish side, 'soon became a volcano that engulfed the whole naval force of the Turks'.²⁹ Eleven thousand Turks perished. Alexei Orlov boasted to Catherine that the water of Chesme was stained incarnadine, and the victorious Empress passed this macabre and distinctly unEnlightened vision on to an excited Voltaire.³⁰ It was the most disastrous day for Turkish arms since the Battle of Lepanto.

When news of Chesme reached St Petersburg, so soon after the glories of Kagul, the Russian capital exploded with joy. There were 'Те Deums' and rewards for every sailor in the fleet inscribed simply: 'I was there.' Catherine rewarded Rumiantsev for Kagul with his field-marshal's baton and the con­struction of an obelisk in her park at Tsarskoe Selo, while Alexei Orlov got the title of Chesmensky ('of Chesme'). It was the greatest array of Russian triumphs since Poltava. Catherine was riding high - especially in Europe: Voltaire actually jumped up and down on his sickbed at Ferney and sang at the thought of so many dead infidels.³¹

Potemkin had covered himself in glory in this year of Russian victories and decided to capitalize on his new success. When operations ceased in November 1770, he asked Rumiantsev for leave to go to St Petersburg. Had someone raised his hopes that Catherine would receive him with open arms? After­wards, Potemkin's enemies claimed that Rumiantsev was relieved to be rid of him. But he actually admired Potemkin's brains and military record, and approved this trip, charging him to protect the interests of himself and his army. His letters to his protege were as paternal as Potemkin's to him were filial.

Potemkin returned to Petersburg with the prestige of a war hero and Rumiantsev's enthusiastic recommendations: This officer of great ability can make far-sighted observations about the land which has been the theatre of war, which deserve your Majesty's attention and respect and, because of this, I'm entrusting him with all the events that have to be reported to Her Majesty.'³²

The Empress, in an exultant mood after Kagul and Chesme, welcomed him warmly: we know from the Court Journal that he was invited to dine with Catherine eleven times during his short stay.³³ Legend says there was a private audience at which Potemkin could not resist more dramatics on bended knee. He and Catherine agreed to correspond, apparently through her librarian Petrov and trusted Chamberlain Ivan Perfilevich Yelagin - useful allies around the Empress. We know little of what happened behind closed doors but one senses that they felt the stirrings of something that both knew could become serious.[17] Whether the private state of Catherine's relationship with Grigory Orlov himself was already shaky, Count Alexei Orlov-Chesmensky had increased the family credit at Court. Potemkin was too early to displace Grigory Orlov, but the trip was not wasted.³⁴

Grigory Orlov certainly noticed Potemkin's welcome and made sure he returned to the army. Potemkin went back late in February, bearing a letter from Orlov to Rumiantsev in which the favourite recommended Potemkin and asked his commander to be his 'tutor and guide'. This was a benign way for Orlov to remind his younger rival of his place, but also a sign that he had become much more important on that trip to Petersburg. He was marked.³⁵

Within weeks, the fighting had started again. But, compared to the feats of the year before, 1771 was to be a disappointment in the theatre of Moldavia and Wallachia, today's Rumania, where Potemkin served. When the Turks sensibly refused to endure any more of Rumiantsev's battles, the Field- Marshal spent the year attacking Turkish positions on the lower Danube, pushing into Wallachia. Potemkin did well: given the task of holding the Kraovsky region, he 'not only repulsed the enemy ... but struck at him too.

He was the first to head across the Danube.' On 5 May, he pulled off a minor coup when he attacked the small town of Zimbry on the other side of the Danube, ravaged it, burned enemy provisions and stole the ships of their flotilla, which he brought back to the Russian side of the river. On 17 May, Potemkin defeated and pursued 4,000 Turks near the Ol'ta river - 'a glorious and famous feat', according to Rumiantsev, 'achieved only thanks to Pot­emkin's skill and courage'. The Turks attacked him on 27 May but were defeated and driven off. He joined up with Repnin again, and together they drove off a powerful Turkish corps under a seraskier (Turkish equivalent of a field-marshal) on 10 June and then took³⁶ Bucharest.

Some time after this fighting advance, Potemkin was struck down by a dangerous fever, which was endemic in the summer months in these Danubian principalities. It was so serious that 'only his strong constitution allowed him to recover because he would not accept any help from doctors', wrote Samoilov. Instead, the prone general put himself in the hands of two Zapo- rogian Cossacks, whom he charged to take care of him and spray him with cooling water. He had always been interested in the exotic peoples of the Empire - hence his position at the Legislative Commission - but this is our first hint of his special friendship with the Cossacks. He studied the culture of his Cossacks and admired their freedom and joie de vivre. They nicknamed him 'Gritsko Nechosa', or 'Grey Wig', after the peruke he sometimes wore, and invited him to become an honorary Cossack. A few months later, on 15 April 1772, he wrote to their Hetman to ask for admittance into this martial order. Entered into the lists of the Zaporogian Host in May that year, he wrote to the Hetman: 'I am delighted.'³⁷

Potemkin had recovered by the time the army crossed the Danube and made a thrust towards the key Turkish fortress of Silistria, which commanded a stretch of the Danube. It was here that Potemkin won the undying hostility of Count Simon Romanovich Vorontsov, a young scion of the family that had reached its peak under Peter III. Born in 1744, the cultured Vorontsov, son of a notoriously corrupt provincial governor (nicknamed Big Pocket), nephew of Peter Ill's Chancellor, had been arrested during the coup for supporting Peter III, but he later made a name for himself as the first officer in to the Turkish trenches at Kagul. Like all Vorontsovs, this pudding-faced Anglophile had a marked appreciation of his own credentials but was rightly regarded by Catherine and Potemkin as politically unreliable and spent most of his career in honourable exile as Ambassador to London. Now, outside Silistria, he had to face the indignity of having his Grenadiers rescued from 12,000 Turkish cavalry by a reluctant Potemkin.

Six days later, Potemkin was in turn saved by Vorontsov: 'not only did we cover him, but we chased those Turks into town', using three batteries of artillery, and killing 'lots'. Vorontsov, writing in 1796, cited both fights as evidence of his own virtuosity and Potemkin's incompetence. Both found it intolerable to be saved by the other. The malice was perfectly symmetrical.³⁸

Silistria did not fall, the army reforded the Danube and there ended Rum­iantsev's tepid campaign. The real action that June was the successful invasion of the weakened Khanate of the Crimea - its army was away on the Danube, facing Rumiantsev - by the Second Army, now commanded by Prince Vasily Dolgoruky.

Catherine was learning that glory was not as quick or cheap as she hoped. The bottomless maw of the army demanded more and more recruits. The harvests were bad. Soldiers' pay was in arrears. Fever ravaged the army while rashes of bubonic plague broke out across the Ottoman Empire. The Russians feared it would spread through the southern armies. It was time to talk peace with the Ottomans before they forgot Chesme and Kagul. Then, in September 1771, terrible news arrived from Moscow.

The plague descended with ghastly intensity on the old capital. In August, the toll was reaching 400 to 500 deaths a day. It was not long before order in the city evaporated. The nobles fled; officials panicked; the Governor abandoned his post; and Moscow became a surreal charnel house, scattered with rotting cadavers, stinking bonfires of flesh and rumours of miracles, curses and conspiracies. In the abandoned city, the streets were patrolled by desperate crowds of peasants and workers who increasingly placed their hopes in a miracle-working icon.³⁹

The last effective authority, Bishop Ambrosius, ordered the icon to be removed to reduce the risk of infection among the crowds who flocked to invoke its miraculous powers. The mob rioted and tore the Bishop to pieces. This was the same Bishop Ambrosius who had lent Potemkin the money to make the trip to St Petersburg. As Russia suffered the strain of the huge cost of war, the mob took control. There was a real danger that the plague might unleash something even worse - a peasant uprising in the countryside. The death toll kept rising.

Grigory Orlov, restless since Catherine gave him no chance to prove himself, offered to travel to Moscow and sort out the situation. On 21 September 1771, he set off. By the time he arrived, 21,000 people were dying every month. Orlov displayed common sense, competence, energy and humanity. He worked tirelessly. Just showing his cherubic countenance and lofty figure around the city reassured the people. He burned 3,000 old houses where the infection could linger, disinfected 6,000 more, founded orphanages, reopened the public baths closed in the quarantine, and spent over 95,000 roubles distributing food and clothing. His Herculean efforts restored order in this Augean Stable. When he departed on 22 November, deathrates were falling - probably thanks to the cold, but the state was once again in control of Moscow. He reached Petersburg on 4 December to popular acclaim. Catherine built one of her arches in his honour in her Tsarskoe Selo park, which was dotted with monuments to her triumphs. She even struck a commemorative medal. It seemed that the Orlovs, that race of heroes, as Voltaire called them, were secure.⁴⁰

When the Turkish talks began the next year, Catherine gave Grigory Orlov the enormous responsibility of negotiating peace. Catherine saw him off in a costume she had given him, embroidered and diamond-studded on every seam. The sight of him inspired her again. 'Count Orlov', she gushed to Madame Bielke, 'is the handsomest man of his generation.'⁴¹

As Orlov left St Petersburg, was Potemkin arriving there to help Catherine with her latest crisis? His precise activities during these months are mysterious. But, some time during the truce with Turks, he certainly visited St Petersburg again.

Orlov's departure for the south precipitated another plot against the Empress which also helped Potemkin. Between thirty and a hundred non­commissioned officers in the Preobrazhensky Guards mutinied. They believed Orlov was travelling to 'the army to persuade them to swear allegiance to him' and make himself 'Prince of Moldavia and Emperor'. Their mission was Catherine's ever present nightmare: to overthrow her and enthrone her son Paul as emperor. The plot was foiled but, as Paul approached his majority, Catherine was understandably nervous.⁴² The Swedish diplomat Ribbing wrote to his Court in July that Catherine had withdrawn to an estate in Finland, to decide what measures to take, accompanied by Kirill Razumovsky, Ivan Chernyshev, Lev Naryshkin - and Potemkin.⁴³ The first names required no explanation - she had trusted them for almost twenty years. But the presence of Potemkin, still only thirty-one, is unexpected. It is his first mention as a close adviser of the Empress. Even if the Swede was mistaken, it still suggests that Potemkin was in Petersburg and already much closer to Cath­erine than anyone realized.

There are more hints that he was already privately advising her, if not making love to her, much earlier than previously thought. When she sum­moned him in late 1773, she told him that he was 'already [author's italics] very close to our heart'.⁴⁴ In February 1774, she told him that she regretted not starting their relationship 'a year and a half ago'⁴⁵ - in other words, in 1772. It was now she started to fall for him.

Then, two months later, when Grigory Orlov opened talks with the Turks in Fokshany in faraway Moldavia, Potemkin, according to Samoilov,⁴⁶ was at the talks, behaving in the manner for which he would later become famous. As Orlov negotiated, Potemkin supposedly spent the hours lazing on a sofa in his dressing gown, plunged in thought. This sounds just like him. It was natural that he and his troops would be in the area along with the rest of the army. Rumiantsev was there of course. Potemkin was presumably in his entourage, but he must have had Catherine's blessing to lounge in the midst of an international peace conference, chaired by the suspicious Orlov. Did

Catherine send Potemkin to watch Orlov? Why else would Orlov have tolerated him?

The real story is why Orlov himself was there at all: he had neither diplomatic experience nor the temperament for the job. It emerged that Catherine had her own private reasons to remove him from St Petersburg, yet would she really have risked the peace conference merely to get him out of the capital? Admittedly he was assisted by the experienced Obreskov, the Russian Ambassador to the Sublime Porte, recently freed from the Seven Towers. But Orlov was scarcely suited to the tortuous horse-trading that the Turks regarded as good manners.

Then he argued with Rumiantsev. Orlov wanted to start the war again; Rumiantsev, who knew that recruits were few, disease rampant and money short, did not. The Field-Marshal's fastidious intelligence gave him the acute- ness of an ice-pick. This must have riled the easygoing giant, who was far out of his depth. Finally, he lost his temper in mid-session and, to the astonishment of the Turkish plenipotentiaries, threatened to hang Rumiantsev himself. The Turks, who still regarded themselves as the receptacles of all that was elegant and civilized, no doubt shook their heads at these manifestations of Slavic barbarism. But the issues at risk there were extremely complicated and becoming more so by the day. Catherine was determined that the Turks should agree to the independence of the Crimea from Turkish sovereignty. The Crimea, suspended from the continent like a diamond from a belly dancer's navel, dominated the Black Sea. The Turks claimed it as their 'pure and immaculate virgin' - the Sultan's lake. Catherine's proposal would remove Turkey from direct control of the northern coast of the Black Sea, except for its fortresses, and bring Russia one step closer to Peter the Great's foiled dream of controlling its power and commerce.

Meanwhile Prussia and Austria were becoming restless at the Russian successes: acquisitive, ruthless Frederick the Great was jealous that his Russian ally might gain too much Ottoman territory. Austria, hostile to Prussia and Russia, secretly negotiated a defensive treaty with the Turks. Prussia wanted some compensation for being a loyal ally to Russia; Austria wanted a reward for being a thoroughly disloyal one to Turkey. Whatever they said, Russia and Prussia both looked longingly at the helpless chaos of Poland. Austria's Empress - Queen, Maria Theresa, balked at this thievery - yet, as Frederick the Great put it, 'she wept, but she took'. Picturesque, feeble and self- destructive Poland was like an unlocked bank from which these imperial brigands could steal what they wished to pay for their expensive wars, satisfy their greed and ease their jealousy of each other. Austria, Prussia and Russia negotiated the First Partition of Poland, leaving Catherine free to enforce her demands on Turkey.

Just when the Polish partition was all but agreed, Sweden, Turkey's trad­itional ally, stepped in to spoil the party. Over the years, Russia had spent millions of roubles on bribes to ensure that Sweden remain a limited mon­archy, split between the French and Russian parties. But in August 1772 its new young King, Gustavus III, restored absolutism in a coup. He encouraged the Turks to fight on. So, back in Fokshany, Orlov became tired of the Turks' intransigence over his demand for Crimean independence. Whether it was the complexity of the diplomacy, the minutiae of Turkish etiquette or the presence of Potemkin, yawning in his dressing gown on the sofa, Orlov now delivered an ultimatum to the Turks that ruined the conference. The Turks walked out.

Orlov had other things on his mind: the Court was in crisis. Suddenly on 23 August, without awaiting orders, he abandoned the conference and headed for Petersburg as fast as his horses would carry him. Potemkin, if he still lay on the sofa as Orlov galloped away, would have been even deeper in thought than usual.

Grigory Orlov was stopped at the gates of St Petersburg at the express order of the Empress. He was ordered, for reasons of quarantine, to proceed to his nearby estate of Gatchina.

Just a few days before, on 30 August, a good-looking ensign in the Horse- Guards, Alexander Vassilchikov, aged twenty-eight, was formally appointed adjutant-general to the Empress and moved into a Winter Palace apartment. Courtiers knew that they had been lovers for a month. After being introduced to Vassilchikov, at the behest of Nikita Panin, Catherine had watched him closely. At Tsarskoe Selo, when he escorted her carriage, she presented him with a gold snuff-box engraved 'For the good bearing of the bodyguards', an unusual reward for sentry duty. On 1 August, he was appointed gentleman of the bedchamber.⁴⁷

When Catherine heard that Grigory Orlov was on his way from Fokshany, she was alarmed but also furious, because his abandonment of the already tottering talks exposed her love life to the gaze of the cabinets of Europe. Indeed the foreign ambassadors were confused: they had presumed Orlov was Catherine's partner for life. They were used to the balance between Panins and Orlovs, now allied to the Chernyshev brothers. No one knew the political effects of the arrival of Vassilchikov, except that the Orlovs were in decline and the Panins were in the ascendant.

Orlov and Catherine had drifted apart for a couple of years: we do not know exactly why. She was now forty and he thirty-eight: perhaps they both longed for younger partners. He had never really shared her intellectual interests. Politically she trusted him and they had been through much together: they shared a son. But Orlov had his intellectual limits - Diderot, who later met him in Paris, thought he was like 'a boiler always boiling but never cooking anything'. Perhaps Potemkin's company made Orlov's uncomplicated solidity less attractive to Catherine. Yet it is a mystery why she did not choose Potemkin to replace him. Perhaps after years of repaying her debt to Orlov and his family, she was not yet ready for Potemkin's dominant and eccentric character. Later, she regretted not summoning him at once.

On the very day that Orlov departed for the south, she later told Potemkin, somebody revealed to her the extent of his infidelities. It was then Catherine admitted that Orlov 'would have remained for ever, had he not been the first to tire'. This is usually taken at face value but she must at least have suspected his peccadilloes for years. His omnivorous sexual appetites were common knowledge among the ambassadors. 'Anything is good enough for him,' Durand claimed. 'He loves like he eats - he is as happy with a Kalmyk or a Finnish girl as with the prettiest girl at Court. That's the sort of oaf he is.' Whatever the real reason, the Empress decided she 'could no longer trust him'.⁴⁸

Catherine negotiated a full settlement with Orlov with a generosity that was to be her lodestar in love: he received an annual pension of 150,000 roubles, 100,000 roubles to set up his household, and the neo-Classical Marble Palace, then under construction, 10,000 serfs, all sorts of other treasures and privileges - and two silver services, one for ordinary use and one for special occasions.⁴⁹ In 1763, the Holy Roman Emperor Francis, Maria Theresa's consort, had granted him the title prince of the Holy Roman Empire. The title prince, or kniaz in Russian, existed in Russia only among the descendants of ancient royal houses.[18] If eighteenth-century tsars wished to raise someone to prince, they requested the Holy Roman Emperor to create him an imperial prince. Now Catherine allowed her ex-lover to use his title.

In May 1773, Prince Orlov returned to court and resumed his official positions, though Vassilchikov remained favourite - and Potemkin was left, impatiently suspended in limbo.⁵⁰

It must have been a disappointed Potemkin who returned to the war. At least Catherine promoted him to lieutenant-general on 21 April 1773. The old establishment was envious. 'The promotion of Potemkin is for me a pill I cannot swallow', wrote Simon Vorontsov to his brother.⁵¹ 'When he was a lieutenant of the Guards, I was already a colonel and he has certainly served less than me .. Л⁵² Vorontsov decided to resign the moment the campaign was over. There is a feeling of exhaustion and reluctance about this frustrating, bad-tempered campaign, even among the veterans of Rumiantsev's victories. There was another attempt to negotiate, this time in Bucharest. But the moment had passed.

Once again, Rumiantsev's tired army, now down to just 3 5,000 men, struck across the Danube at the obstinate fortress of Silistria. Potemkin 'was the first to open the campaign in the severe winter with his march to the Danube', reported the Field-Marshal, 'and the organizing of a series of raids across to the other bank of the river with his reserve corps. When the army approached the Danube crossing and when the enemy in great numbers of people and artillery consolidated on the opposite bank on the Gurabalsky hills to prevent our passage', Potemkin, continued Rumiantsev, 'was the first to get across the river on the boats and to land his forces against the enemy'. The new Lieutenant-General captured the Ottoman camp on 7 June. But Potemkin was already marked as a coming man: a fellow general, Prince Yuri Dolgoruky, another of that ubiquitous clan, claimed that 'timid' Potemkin 'never kept order' during the river crossings and was respected by Rumiantsev only because of his 'connections at Court'. Yet Dologoruky's memoirs are notoriously untrustworthy. The demanding Rumiantsev - and his fellow officers - admired and liked Potemkin - and valued him highly during this campaign.⁵³

Silistria's 'very strong' garrison made a powerful sortie against Potemkin. On 12 June, not far from Silistria, he repelled another attack, according to Rumiantsev, taking the enemy artillery. Rumiantsev's forces approached the familiar walls of Silistria. On 18 June, Lieutenant-General Potemkin, 'in command of the advance corps, overcame all the biggest difficulties and dangers, driving the enemy away from the fortifications before the town'. On 7 July, he defeated a Turkish corps of 7,000 cavalry. Even in the arms of Vassilchikov, indeed especially in his worthy but dull company, Catherine did not forget Potemkin: when she told Voltaire that June about the strike across the Danube, she mentioned Potemkin's name for the first time. She was missing him.⁵⁴

As summer turned to autumn, Potemkin supervised the building of batteries of artillery on the island opposite Silistria. The weather was deteriorating; the Turks showed every sign that they were not going to give up Silistria. 'Tormented by the severity of the weather and the sallies of the enemy', Potemkin 'carried out all the necessary actions to bombard the town, causing fear and damage'.⁵⁵ When the Russians did penetrate the walls, the Turks fought street by street, house by house. Rumiantsev withdrew. The weather was now freezing. Potemkin's batteries went back to bombarding the fortress.

At this tense and uncomfortable moment, an imperial courier arrived in Rumianstev's camp with a letter for Potemkin. Dated 4 December, it speaks for itself:

Sir! Lieutenant-General and Chevalier, you are probably so absorbed by gazing at Silistria that you have no time to read letters and though I do not as yet know whether your bombardment was successful, I am sure that every one of your deeds is done out of zeal for me personally and out of service for our beloved Motherland.

But, since on my part I am most anxious to preserve fervent, brave, clever and talented individuals, I beg you to keep out of danger. When you read this letter, you may well ask yourself why I have written it. To this, I reply: I've written this letter so that you should have confirmation of my way of thinking about you, because I have

always been your most benevolent,

Catherine.⁵⁶

In the filthy, freezing and dangerous discomfort of his benighted camp beneath Silistria, this letter must have seemed like a communication from Mount Olympus, and that is what it was. It does not read like a passionate love letter written in a hurry. On the contrary, it is an arch, cautious and carefully drafted declaration that says much and yet nothing. It did not invite Potemkin to the capital, but it is obviously a summons, if not what is popularly known as a 'come-on'. One suspects he already knew Catherine's 'way of thinking' about him - that she was already in love with the man who had loved her for over a decade. They were already corresponding - hence Catherine implied that Potemkin had not bothered to answer all her letters. His moody insou­ciance in ignoring imperial letters must have made him all the more attractive, given the sycophantic reverence which surrounded Catherine. The excited Potemkin understood this as the long-awaited invitation to Petersburg.

Moreover, Catherine's fear for Potemkin's life was not misplaced. Rum­iantsev now had to extract his army from its messy operations at Silistria and get it safely across the Danube. Potemkin was given the honour of the most dangerous role in this operation: 'When the main part recrossed back over the river,' remembered Rumiantsev, 'he was the last to do so because he covered our forces on the enemy's bank.'⁵⁷ Nonetheless, it would probably be an understatement to say Potemkin was in a hurry to reach the capital.

Potemkin's critics, such as Simon Vorontsov and Yuri Dolgoruky, mostly writing after his death when it was fashionable to denounce him, claimed he was an incompetent and a coward.⁵⁸ Yet, as we have seen, Field-Marshals Golitsyn and Rumiantsev acclaimed his exploits well before he rose to power, and other officers wrote to their friends about his daring, right up until Silistria. Rumiantsev's report described Potemkin as 'one of those military commanders who extolled the glory ... of Russian arms by courage and skill'. What is the truth?

Rumiantsev's complimentary report to Catherine was written after Pot­emkin's rise in 1775 and was therefore bound to exaggerate his achievements - but Rumiantsev was not the sort of man to lie. So Potemkin performed heroically in the Turkish War and made his name.

As soon as the army was in winter quarters, he dashed for St Petersburg. His impatience was noticed, suspected and analysed by the many observers of Court intrigues, who asked one another - 'Why so hastily?'⁵⁹

6

THE HAPPIEST MAN ALIVE

Thy lovely eyes captivated me yet I trembled to say I loved.

G. A. Potemkin to Catherine II, February/March 1774

This clever fellow is as amusing as the very devil.

Catherine II on G. A. Potemkin

So much changed the moment Grigory Alexandrovich [Potemkin] arrived!

Countess Ekaterina Rumiantseva to Count Peter Rumiantsev, 20 March 1774

Lieutenant-General Grigory Potemkin arrived in St Petersburg some time in January 1774 and strode exuberantly into a Court in turmoil, no doubt expecting to be invited into Catherine's bed and government. If so, he was to be disappointed.

The general moved into a cottage in the courtyard of his brother-in-law Nikolai Samoilov's house¹ and then went to present himself to the Empress. Did she tell him of the disasters and intrigues that swirled around her? Did she beg him to be patient? Potemkin was so enervated with anticipation that he found patience difficult. Ever since he was a child, he had believed he was destined to command and, ever since he joined the Guards, he had been in love with the Empress. He appeared to be all impulse and passion, yet he had learned to wait a little. He appeared frequently at Court and made Catherine laugh. The courtiers knew that Potemkin was suddenly ascending. One day, he was going upstairs at the Winter Palace when he passed a descending Prince Orlov. 'Any news?', Potemkin asked Orlov. 'No,' Prince Orlov replied, 'except that I am on the way down and you're on the way up.' But nothing happened - at least not in public. The days passed into weeks. The wait was excruciating for someone of Potemkin's nature. Catherine was in a complicated and sensitive situation, personally and politically, so she moved slowly and cautiously. Vassilchikov remained her official lover - he still lived in his Palace apartments and he presumably shared her bed. However,

Vassilchikov was a disappointing companion for Catherine, who found him corrosively dull. Boredom bred unhappiness, then contempt. 'His caresses only made me cry,' she told Potemkin afterwards.² Potemkin became more and more impatient: she had sent him encouraging letters and summoned him. He had come as fast as he could. He had waited for this moment for twelve devoted years. She knew how clever and capable he was: why not let him help her? She had admitted she had feelings for him as he had for her. Why not throw out Vassilchikov?

Still nothing happened. He confronted her about the meaning of the summons. She replied something like: 'Calme-toi. I am going to think about what you have said and wait until I tell you my decision.'³ Perhaps she wanted him to master the intricacies of her political situation first, perhaps she was teasing him, hoping that their relationship would grow when the moment was right. No one believed in the benefits of careful preparation like Catherine. Most likely, she simply wanted him to force the issue, for she needed his fearless confidence as much as his brains and love. Potemkin learned fast enough why Catherine needed him now: he would have known much of it already. But when he was briefed by the Empress and his friends, he must have realized she was embroiled in her gravest crisis - politically, militarily, romantically - since the day she came to power. It had started, just a few months earlier, in the land of the Yaik Cossacks.

On 17 September 1773, a charismatic Don Cossack appeared before an enthused crowd of Cossacks, Kalmyks and Tartars near Yaiksk, the head­quarters of the Yaik Cossacks, thousands of versts south-east of Moscow in another world from Petersburg, and declared that he was the Emperor Peter III, who had not been murdered, but was there to lead them against the evil Catherine. He called her 'the German, the Devil's daughter'. The soi-disant 'Emperor' was really Emelian Pugachev, a lean, swarthy army deserter with a black goatee beard and brown hair. He did not even look like Peter III. But that did not matter because no one in those remote parts would have rec­ognized the real thing: Pugachev, born around 1740 (almost the same age as Potemkin), had fought in the Seven Years War and at the siege of Bender. He had grievances against the Government, had been arrested and had escaped.

He promised all things to all men - he was the 'sweet-tongued, merciful, soft-hearted Russian Tsar'. He had already displayed the 'Tsar's marks' on his body to convince these simple angry people that he bore the stigmata they expected of their anointed ruler. He promised them 'lands, waters, woods, dwellings, grasses, rivers, fishes, bread ...', and anything else he could possibly conjure.

This exceedingly generous political manifesto proved irresistible to many of those who listened to him - but especially to the Yaik Cossacks. The Cossacks were martial communities or Hosts of freemen, outcasts, escaped criminals, runaway serfs, religious dissidents, deserters, bandits of mixed

Tartar and Slavic blood who had fled to the frontiers to form armed bands on horseback, living by plunder and rapine, and raising horses. Each Host - the Don, the Yaik, the Zaporogian and their Polish and Siberian brothers - developed its own culture, but they were generally organized as primitive frontier democracies who elected a hetman or ataman in times of war.

For centuries, they played the middle ground, allying with Poland, Lithu­ania or Sweden against Muscovy, with Russia against the Crimean khans or Ottoman sultans. In the eighteenth century, they remained as likely to rob Russians as Turks but were useful to Russia as border guards and light cavalry. However, the tension between the Russian state and the Cossacks was growing. These Cossacks were concerned with their own problems - they were worried that they were going to be incorporated into the regular army with its drilling discipline and that they would have to shave their beards. The Yaik Cossacks particularly were concerned with recent disputes about fishing rights. A mutiny had been harshly suppressed just a year earlier. But there was more: the Russo-Turkish War was now in its fifth full year and its costs in men and money fell especially on the peasantry. These people wanted to believe in their scraggly 'Peter III'.

Pugachev ignited this powderkeg. In Russia, the tradition of 'pretenderism' was still strong. In the seventeenth-century Time of Troubles', the 'False Dmitri' had even ruled in Moscow. In a vast primitive country where the tsars were all-powerful and all-good and the simple folk believed them to be touched by God, the image of this kind, Christ-like ruler, wandering among the people and then emerging to save them, was a powerful element of Russian folklore.[19] This was not as odd as it might sound: England had had its share of pretenders, such as Perkin Warbeck, who in 1490 claimed to be Richard, Duke of York, one of the murdered 'Princes in the Tower'.

Pretenderism became a historical vocation for a certain breed of mavericks, deserters, Old Believers who lived on the frontiers - outsiders who would claim to be a recently dead or overthrown Tsar. The real Tsar in question had to have ruled for a short enough time to maintain the illusion that, if evil nobles and foreigners had not overthrown him, he would have saved the common people. This made Peter III an ideal candidate. By the end of Catherine's reign, there had been twenty-four ersatz Peters, but none had the success of Pugachev.

There was one other successful impostor: the False Peter III of Montenegro, in today's Yugoslavia. At the beginning of the war in 1769, when the fleet was trying to raise Balkan Orthodoxy against the Turks, Catherine had Alexei Orlov send an envoy to the remote Balkan land of Montenegro, which was ruled by a sometime healer, possibly an Italian, named 'Stephen the Small' who had united the warlike tribes by claiming to be Peter III. The envoy, Prince Yuri Dolgoruky (later the critic of Potemkin's soldiering), was amazed to discover that this Montenegran 'Peter III', a curly-haired thirty- year-old with a high voice, a white silk tunic and a red cap, had ruled since 1766. Dolgoruky exposed the mountebank. But, unable to control Montenegro, he put him back on his throne, wearing the dignity of a Russian officer's uniform. Small Stephen ruled Montenegro for another five years until his murder. Indeed, he was one of the best rulers Montenegro ever had.⁴

The day after Pugachev declared himself emperor, his wily opportunism had won him 300 supporters, who began storming government forts. His army increased. Those so-called forts were really just villages encircled by wooden fences and filled with unreliable Cossacks, discontented peasants and a small sleepy garrison of soldiers. They were not hard to capture. Within weeks, the south-eastern borderlands were almost literally ablaze.⁵

On 5 October, 'Peter III' arrived before the local capital of Orenburg, now with an army of 3,000 and over twenty cannons, leaving the bodies of nobles and officers hanging in their fallen strongholds or outside their burning mansions, usually headless, handless and legless. Women were raped and then beaten to death; men were often hanged upside down. One corpulent officer was flayed alive and stuffed while the rebels cut out his fat and rubbed it on to their wounds. His wife was torn to pieces and his daughter was consoled by being placed in the 'Amparator's' harem, where she was later murdered by Cossacks who envied her place of favour.

On 6 November, 'Amperator Peter Fadarivich' founded a College of War at his headquarters at Berda outside Orenburg. Soon he wore a gold- embroidered kaftan and a fur hat, his chest was covered in medals and his henchmen were known as 'Count Panin' and 'Count Vorontsov'. He had secretaries writing out his manifestos in Russian, German, French, Arabic and the Turkic languages; judges to keep order among his men; commanders to lead different armies; deserters to fire his cannons. His mounted army must have been an awesome, exotic and barbaric sight: much of it was made up of peasants, Cossacks and Turkic horsemen, armed with lances, scythes, and bows and arrows.

When the news first reached the 'Devil's daughter' back in St Petersburg in mid-October, Catherine took it for a minor Cossack mutiny and despatched General Vasily Kar with a force to suppress it. In early November, Kar was defeated by the frenzied horde, suddenly 25,000 strong, and fled back to Moscow in shame.

These initial successes gave Pugachev the prestige he needed. As his ruffians took cities, he was received by bell-ringing, icon-bearing reception committees of priests and townsfolk offering prayers to 'Peter III and the Grand Duke Paul' (not to Catherine of course).

'Pugachev was sitting in an armchair on the steps of the commandant's house,' wrote Pushkin in his story The Captain's Daughter, which is based on his research and conversations with witnesses. 'He was wearing a red Cossack coat trimmed with gold lace. A tall sable cap with gold tassels was set low over his flashing eyes ... The Cossack elders surrounded him ... In the square gallows were being prepared'.⁶ Sometimes, sixty nobles were hanged together. It is said rewards of 100 roubles were offered for each dead nobleman and the title 'general' for ten burned mansions.

'The Emperor' would then dine in the local governor's house, often accom­panied by his terrified widow and daughters; the governor himself would probably be hanging outside. The ladies would either be hanged or granted to a chieftain for his private pleasure. While he was publicly hailed as Sovereign, the Emperor's private dinners were informal Cossack feasts. After recruiting more men, commandeering cannons and stealing the local treasury, he would ride off again to the ringing of bells and the singing of prayers.⁷ By early December, Pugachev was besieging the towns of Samara and Orenburg, as well as Ufa in Baskiria, with an army now approaching 30,000, swelled by all the discontented of the south - Cossacks, Tartars, Bashkirs, Kirghiz and Kalmyks.

Pugachev was already making mistakes; his marriage for example to his favourite mistress was hardly the behaviour of an emperor who, if he was really alive, was already married to a certain 'Devil's daughter' in St Peters­burg. Nonetheless, as December arrived, it was suddenly clear that he was a real threat to the Russian Empire.

The timing of Catherine's letter to Potemkin was far from coincidental. She wrote to him when she had just received news that Pugachev had routed Kar. This was no minor upheaval: the Volga region was rising under what appeared to be an organized and competent leader. Five days before lifting her pen to Potemkin, she had appointed the impressive General Alexander Bibikov, a friend of both Panin and Potemkin, to suppress the pretender. Politically, she needed someone unattached to the leading parties but linked only to her who could advise on her military matters. Personally, she missed the friend whom she now loved. It was as if all the years of their strange relationship, potentially so close yet perpetually so distant, had been preparing for this moment.

As Potemkin got ready to come to her, the rebellion was far from the only worrying challenge. There was another true pretender, much closer to home and all the more dangerous: her son. On 20 September 1772, Grand Duke Paul - the Tsarevich and the threat to her reign and therefore her life - turned eighteen, so she could not long delay recognizing his majority when he had every reason to expect to be allowed to marry, maintain his own court and play a significant political role. The first was possible, if not attractive, the second was feasible but far from convenient and the third was impossible. Catherine feared that to take Paul as any sort of co-ruler would be the first step to her own overthrow. While she considered what to do, a new plot demonstrated that Paul remained her Achilles' heel.

Catherine's difficulties had started with her dismissal of Prince Orlov a year earlier and her embrace of Vassilchikov, who was no help in matters of state - or the heart. The fall of Orlov appeared to mark the triumph of Nikita Panin, who as Paul's Governor must have anticipated an even larger slice of power. But the balance was restored by the reappearance of a cheerful Prince Orlov in May 1773, after 'travelling abroad'. He rejoined the Council in June. He must have imposed a three-line whip of his family since Petersburg now felt the formidable presence of all five Orlov brothers.

Faced with Paul's majority, Catherine searched for a grand duchess in much the same way that Elisabeth had found her. Then and now, the Empress decided that a German princess, not directly linked to either Austria or Prussia, would be most appropriate. In June, Paul expressed his interest in Princess Wilhelmina, second daughter of the Landgraf of Hesse-Darmstadt, whose family business was renting out his Hessians as mercenaries. At about the time Wilhelmina converted to Orthodoxy on 15 August, Paul received a not altogether unattractive proposition from a diplomat in the Russian service, Caspar von Saldern, a native of Paul's Duchy of Holstein. He persuaded Paul to put his name to a plan for mother and son to rule jointly like Maria Theresa and Joseph of Austria. As soon as Panin heard of this, he tried to cover up. When Catherine discovered the plot, she was so angry with Saldern she wanted 'the wretch tied neck and heels and brought straight here'.⁸ He never visited Russia again.⁹

As if all this - war, filial tension, possible treason and the widespread peasant rebellion - was not enough, a literary celebrity arrived in Petersburg on 28 September 1773 ^and provided Catherine with a short interval of comic relief. The Empress admired his Encyclopaedia but it is hard to imagine a more inconvenient moment for Denis Diderot's visit. The Encyclopaedist, bearing all the ludicrous delusions of the French philosophes, expected to advise Catherine on the immediate reform of her entire Empire. Staying for five months in a house a few hundred yards from the Winter Palace (it is marked with a plaque near St Isaac's Cathedral), his conversations helped her through the monotony of life with Vassilchikov.

However, Diderot soon began to irritate her - though if one compares his sojourn to Voltaire's disastrous stay with Frederick the Great, it was a moderate success. Catherine naughtily claimed that he bruised her knees which he pummelled as he over-excitedly told her how to run Russia.¹⁰ He did at least introduce her to his companion Frederich Melchior Grimm, who became her dearest correspondent for the rest of her life.

Diderot's sole achievement was probably to convince her, if Pugachev had not already done so, that abstract reform programmes had little use in Russia: 'you only work on paper ...', she told him, 'while I, poor Empress, I work on human skin.'¹¹ Catherine, said Diderot, had 'the soul of Caesar with the seductions of Cleopatra.'¹²

On 29 September, Paul, undermined by the Saldern Affair, married his Grand Duchess Natalia (formerly Wilhelmina), followed by ten days of celebrations. Count Panin remained Foreign Minister but he had to give up his position as Paul's Governor, losing his rooms in the palaces. He was consoled with promotion to the highest echelon of the Table of Ranks, a pension of 30,000 roubles and a gift of 9,000 souls. To pacify the Orlovs, Catherine promoted their ally Zakhar Chernyshev to field-marshal and President of the College of War. But the Saldern Affair had damaged all of them: Catherine no longer trusted Panin but was stuck with his Northern System. She no longer respected Orlov, but his clan was a pillar of her regime. She forgave him the folly of Fokshany but would not take him back as a lover. She found her own son Paul narrow-minded, bitter and uncongenial. She could never trust him in government - yet he was Heir. She was bored with Vassilchikov yet she had made him her official favourite. Catherine, surrounded by a fierce rivalry between Panins and Orlovs, had never been more alone.¹³

This risky dilemma was also harming her image in Europe. Frederick the Great, that misanthropic genius who presided over an austere all-male court, was particularly disgusted: Orlov had been recalled to all offices, he fumed, 'except that of fucking'. Frederick also sensed that the uncertainty at Court would threaten Panin and his Prussian alliance. 'It is a terrible business', declared the King of Prussia, 'when the prick and the cunt decide the interests of Europe.'¹⁴ But by late January the freshly arrived Potemkin was deciding nothing. He could not wait any longer. He decided to force Catherine's hand.

Potemkin declared he was no longer interested in earthly glories: he was to take holy orders. He at once left Samoilov's cottage, moved into the Alexander Nevsky Monastery, founded by Peter the Great, on the outskirts of eighteenth- century Petersburg, and lived, as a monk, growing a beard, fasting, reading, praying and chanting ostentatiously. The suspense of waiting, on the verge of success, in a political and personal hothouse, was, in itself, enough to strain Potemkin's manic nature to the edge of a breakdown, which he soothed by immersing himself in Orthodox mysticism. But he was also a born politician with the appropriate thespian talents. His melodramatic retreat put public pressure on Catherine; he was almost going 'on strike', withdrawing his advice and support unless she gave him the credit for it. It has been suggested that he and the Empress arranged this together to accelerate his rise. The pair were soon to show they were quite capable of prearranged stunts, but in this case Potemkin's behaviour seems equally divided between piety, depression and artifice.¹⁵

His cell, more like a coenobitic political campaign headquarters, saw much coming and going between fasts. Carriages galloped through the gates and departed again; servants, courtiers and the rustling skirts of imperial ladies, particularly Countess Bruce, rushed on and off the Baroque stage of the monastery like characters in an opera, bearing notes and whispered mes­sages.¹⁶ First, as in every opera, there was a song. Potemkin let Catherine know that he had written one to her. It has the ring of Potemkin's passion - and also the mawkishness that is the hallmark of love songs, then and now. But as a description of his situation, it is not bad. 'As soon as I beheld thee, I thought of thee alone ... But О Heavens, what torment to love one to whom I dare not declare it! one who can never be mine! Cruel gods! Why have you given her such charms? And why did you exalt her so high? Why did you destine me to love her and her alone?'¹⁷ Potemkin made sure Countess Bruce told the Empress how his 'unfortunate and violent passion had reduced him to despair and, in his sad situation, he deemed it prudent to fly the object of his torment since the sight alone could aggravate his sufferings which were already intolerable.'¹⁸ He began 'to hate the world because of his love for her - and she was flattered'.¹⁹

Catherine replied with an oral message that went something like this: 'I cannot understand what can have reduced him to such despair since I have never declared against him. I fancied on the contrary that the affability of my reception must have given him to understand that his homage was not displeasing.'²⁰ It was not enough. The fasting, chanting, rustling of go-between skirts and delivery of messages continued. The holier of the monks must surely have rolled their eyes at this worldly bustle.

Catherine, by all accounts, made up her mind and despatched Countess Bruce - ironically, Rumiantsev's estranged sister - to bring Potemkin back. The Countess, in all her finery, arrived at the monastery in a Court coach. She was taken to Potemkin, who was bearded, wearing monk's habit and prostrated in a plain cell before an icon of St Catherine. In case the Countess was in any doubt about his sincerity, he continued praying and chanting for a very long time. Finally Potemkin deigned to hear her message. He then swiftly shaved, washed and dressed in uniform to re-emerge at Court.

What was Catherine feeling during this operatic interlude? During the next weeks, when they were finally lovers, she revealed to him, in this most tender and moving account, how she already loved him by the time he returned from the army:

Then came a certain hero [bogatr]: this hero, through his valour and demeanour, was already very close to our heart; on hearing of his arrival, people began to talk of his staying here, not knowing we had already written to him, on the quiet, asking him to do so, with the secret intention however of not acting blindly when he did come, but of trying to discover whether he really had the inclination of which Countess Bruce said that many suspected him, the inclination I wanted him to have.²¹

The Empress was at Tsarskoe Selo outside the city. Potemkin rode out there, most likely accompanied by Countess Bruce. The Court Journal tells us that Potemkin was presented on the evening of 4 February: he was ushered straight into her private apartments, where they remained alone for an hour. He is mentioned again on the 9th, when he attended a formal dinner at the Catherine Palace. They dined officially together four times in February, but we can guess that they were together much more: we have a few undated notes from Catherine to Potemkin that we can place in those days.¹² The first is addressed 'Mon ami', which suggests a growing warmth but warns him about bumping into a shocked Grand Duke, who already hated Prince Orlov for being his mother's lover.²³ In the second, written a few days later, Potemkin has been promoted to 'Mon cher ami'. Already she is using the nicknames they have made up for the courtiers: one of the Golitsyns is 'M. le Gros' - 'Fatty' - but, more importantly, she calls Potemkin 'l'esprit' - 'the wit'.²⁴

They were coming closer by the hour. On the 14th, the Court returned to the Winter Palace in town. On the 15th, there was another dinner with both Vassilchikov and Potemkin among the twenty guests. One can imagine the unhappiness of poor Vassilchikov as Potemkin dominated the scene.

Potemkin and the Empress might have consummated their love affair around this time. Few of their thousands of notes are dated, but there is one that we can tentatively place around 15 February in which Catherine cancels a meeting with 'l'esprit' in the banya, the Russian steam-bath, mainly because 'all my ladies are there now and probably won't leave for another hour'.²⁵ Ordinary men and women bathed together in banyas in the eighteenth century, much to the indignation of foreigners, but empresses did not. This is the first mention of Catherine and Potemkin meeting in the banya, but it was to be their favourite place for rendezvous. If they were meeting in the intimate banya on the 15th, it is likely they were already lovers.

On the 18th, the Empress attended a Russian comedy at the House of Opera and then probably met Potemkin in her apartments. They talked or made love until one in the morning - extremely late for that disciplined Germanic princess. In a note in which one can sense their increasing intensity but also her submissiveness to him, she sweetly worries that 'I exceeded your patience ... my watch stopped and the time passed so quickly that an hour seemed like a minute.'²⁶

'My darling, what nonsense you talked yesterday ...', she wrote in these early days. 'The time I spend with you is so happy. We passed four hours together, boredom vanishes and I don't want to part with you. My dear, my friend, I love you so much: you are so handsome, so clever, so jovial, so witty: when I am with you, I attach no importance to the world. I've never been so happy.. Л²⁷ For the first time, we can hear the intimate laughter that must have echoed at night out of the Winter Palace banya. They were both sensualists - a pair of Epicureans. 'My darling friend, I fear you might be angry with me. If not, all the better. Come quickly to my bedroom and prove it.'²⁸

Vassilchikov was still in residence - at least officially. Catherine and Pot­emkin nicknamed him 'soupe a la glace' - 'iced soup'.²⁹ It was now she told Potemkin that she wished they had started a year and half before instead of wasting precious time unhappily.³⁰ But the presence of Vassilchikov in his apartments was still upsetting Potemkin, who was always hysterically jealous. He had apparently flounced off because, in a letter a few days later, Catherine had to coax him back: 'I cannot force someone to caress ... You know my nature and my heart, you know my good and bad qualities, I let you choose your behaviour ... It is silly to torment yourself ... You ruin your health for nothing.'³¹

Vassilchikov has been almost forgotten, but these days must have been agonizing for him. Catherine was ruthless with those she could not respect and one senses she was ashamed of his mediocrity. Vassilchikov realized that he could never play the role of Potemkin, whose 'standing was very different from mine. I was merely a sort of kept woman ... I was scarcely allowed to see anyone or go out. When I asked for anything, no notice was taken whatsoever ... When I was anxious for the Order of St Anna, I spoke about it to the Empress and found 30,000 roubles in my pocket next day in notes. I always had my mouth closed like that... As for Potemkin, he gets what he wants ... he is the master.'³²

'The master' insisted that the unfortunate bowl of 'Iced Soup' be removed from the table. Vassilchikov moved out of his apartments in the Winter Palace. They became the Council Room, because Potemkin refused to live in someone else's apartments. New rooms were decorated for him. Potemkin himself moved out of the cottage at the Samoilov's to stay with the trusted Chamberlain Yelagin.³³

By late February, the relationship was no longer either an amorous courtship or a sexual affair: the couple were absolutely committed. On the 27th, Potemkin was confident enough to write a letter requesting that he be appointed 'general and personal aide-de-camp to Her Majesty'. There were a handful of adjutant-generals, mostly just courtiers. But in this case the meaning would be clear. He added in what was presumably a Potemkinian joke, 'it could not offend anybody'. Both of them must have laughed at this. His arrival would offend everybody, from the Orlovs to the Panins, from Maria Theresa and Frederick the Great to George III and Louis XVI. It would change the political landscape and ultimately Russia's alliances abroad. But no matter, because he touchingly added his real feelings: 'I would be the happiest man alive .. Л³⁴ The letter was handed in to Stekalov, who was in charge of requests, like any other petition. But this one was answered far more quickly.

'Lieutenant-General... I think your request is appropriate,' she replied the next day, taking off official language, 'in view of the services that you have rendered to me and our Motherland.' It was typical of Potemkin simply to write officially: 'he was the only one of her favourites who dared to become enamoured of her and to make the first advances', wrote Charles Masson, later Swiss mathematics tutor at Court and author of scandalous but unreliable memoirs. Catherine appreciated this courage in her reply: 'I am ordering the drawing up of your nomination to adjutant-general. I must confess to you that I am pleased that you, trusting me, decided to send your request directly to me without looking for roundabout ways.'³⁵ It is at this moment that Potemkin steps out of the shadows of history to become one of the most described and discussed statesmen of the century.

'A new scene has just opened,' Sir Robert Gunning, the English envoy, reported to the Earl of Suffolk, Secretary of State for the North, in London on 4 March, having just watched the new Adjutant-General at Court, 'which is likely to merit more attention than any that has presented itself since the beginning of this reign.' Since this was the age of letter-writing, everyone now wrote about Potemkin. Diplomats were agog because, as Gunning saw at once, Potemkin was abler than both Prince Orlov and Vassilchikov. It is interesting that, just a few days after appearing as official favourite, even foreigners not intimate with the Court were informing their kings that Pot­emkin had arrived to love the Empress and help her rule. 'Mr Vassilchikov the favourite whose understanding was too limited to admit of his having any influence in affairs or sharing his mistress's confidence', explained Gunning, 'is replaced by a man who bids fair for possessing them both in the most supreme degree.'³⁶ The Prussian Ambassador Count von Solms went further to Frederick: 'Evidently Potemkin ... will become the most influential person in Russia. Youth, intellect and positive qualities will give him such importance ... Soon Prince Grigory Grigorevich [Orlov] will be forgotten and Orlov's family will drop to the common standard.'³⁷

Russia's chief ally was even more repulsed than he had been by the arrival of Vassilchikov two years before. Thoroughly informed by Solms, Frederick the Great wrote to his brother Prince Henry ridiculing the newcomer's name - 'General Patukin or Tapukin' - but recognized that his rise to power 'might prove prejudicial to the well-being of our affairs'. Being Frederick, he coined a philosophical principle of misogynistic statesmanship: 'A woman is always a woman and, in feminine government, the cunt has more influence than a firm policy guided by straight reason.'³⁸

The Russian courtiers observed Potemkin carefully, chronicling every move of the new favourite, even his jewellery and the decoration of his apartments. Every detail meant something that was important for them to know. Solms had already discovered that Potemkin's arrival did not trouble the Panins.³⁹ 'I think this new actor will play his part with great vivacity and big changes if he'll be able to consolidate his position,'⁴⁰ wrote General Peter Panin to Prince Alexander Kurakin on 7 March. Evidently, the Panins thought they could use Potemkin to obliterate the credit of the Orlovs.⁴¹ 'The new Adjutant- General is always on duty instead of all the others,' Countess Sievers wrote to her husband, one of Catherine's senior officials. 'They say he is pleasant and modest.'⁴² Potemkin was already amassing the sort of power Vassilchikov never possessed. 'If you want anything, my sweet,' Countess Rumiantseva wrote to her husband, the Field-Marshal, down with the army, 'ask Pot­emkin.'⁴³

To her friend Grimm, Catherine paraded her exhilaration at escaping Vas­silchikov and finding Potemkin: 'I have drawn away from a certain good- natured but extremely dull character, who has immediately been replaced by one of the greatest, wittiest and most original eccentrics of this iron century.'⁴⁴

PART THREE

Together

1774-1776

7

LOVE

The doors will be open ... I am going to bed ... Darling, I will do whatever you command. Shall I come to you or will you come to me?

Catherine II to G. A. Potemkin

This was Potemkin, a great thing in days

When homicide and harlotry made great. If stars and titles could entail long praise,

His glory might half equal his estate This fellow, being six foot high, could raise

A kind of phantasy proportionate In the then sovereign of the Russian people, Who measured men as you would do a steeple.

Lord Byron, Don Juan Canto VII: 37

Everything about the love of Catherine and Potemkin is exceptional. Both were extraordinary individuals in the most unique of circumstances. Yet the love affair on which they were now embarked has features that are universal, even today. Their passion was so exhausting and tumultuous that it is easy to forget that they loved one another while ruling a vast empire - at war abroad, in civil war at home. She was an empress and he a subject - both of matching 'boundless ambition' - living in a highly competitive Court where everything was seen and every glance had political consequences. They often forgot themselves in their love and moods, but neither was ever completely private: Catherine was always the Sovereign, and Potemkin, from the first day, was more than a mere favourite, a politician of the first rank.

The lovers were no longer young by the standards of their time: Potemkin was thirty-four, Catherine ten years older. But their love was all the more touching for their imperfections. In February 1774, Potemkin had long since lost his Alcibiadean perfection. Now he was a bizarre and striking sight that fascinated, appalled and attracted his contemporaries in equal measure. His stature was colossal, yet his figure was still lithe; his admired head of hair was long and unbrushed, a rich brown, almost auburn, sometimes covered by grey wigs. His head too was titanic, but almost pear-like in shape. His profile resembled the soft lines of a dove - perhaps that is why Catherine often called him that. The face was pale, long, thin and oddly sensitive in such a huge man - more that of a poet than a general. The mouth was one of his best features: his lips were full and red; his teeth strong and white, a rare asset at that time; his chin had a dimple cleft. His right eye was green and blue; his left one was useless, half closed, and sometimes it made him squint. It looked strange - though Jean-Jacob Jennings, a Swedish diplomat, who met him much later, said 'the eye defect' was much less noticeable than he had expected. Potemkin never got over his sensitivity about it, but it gave him a certain vulnerability as well as a piratical air. The 'defect' did make this outlandish figure seem more like a mythical beast - Panin called him 'Le Borgne' - 'the blindman', but most followed the Orlovs and called him 'Cyclops'.¹

The diplomatic corps were immediately rapt: 'his figure is gigantic and disproportioned and his countenance is far from engaging', wrote Gunning, but:

Potemkin appears to have a great knowledge of mankind and more of the dis­criminating faculty than his countrymen in general possess and as much address in intrigue and suppleness in his station as any of them. Though the profligacy of his manner is notorious, he is the only one to have formed connections with the clergy. With these qualifications he may naturally flatter himself with the hopes of rising to that height to which his boundless ambition aspires.²

Solms reported, 'Potemkin is very tall, well formed but has an unpleasant appearance because he squints,' but three days later he added that given his 'youth and intellect ... it will be easy for General Potemkin ... to occupy Orlov's place in the Empress's heart'.³

His manners varied from those of a courtier at Versailles to those of one of his Cossack friends. This is why Catherine delighted in nicknaming him after Cossacks, Tartars and wild animals. His contemporaries, especially Catherine, agreed that the whole picture, with its Russian scale and its mixture of ugliness and beauty, reeked of primitive energy, an almost animalistic sexuality, out­rageous originality, driving intellect and surprising sensitivity. He was either loved - or hated. As one of Kirill Razumovsky's daughters asked: 'How can one pay court to the blind beggar and why?'⁴

Catherine remained a sexually attractive, handsome and very majestic woman in her prime. Her brow was high and strong, the blue eyes bright, playful and coolly arrogant. Her eyelashes were black, her mouth shapely, her nose slightly aquiline, her skin remained white and blooming, and her bearing made her appear taller than she was. She was already voluptuous, which she camouflaged by always wearing 'an ample robe with broad sleeves ... similar to ancient Muscovite costume'.⁵ Everyone acclaimed her 'dignity tempered with graciousness,'⁶ which made her 'still beautiful, infinitely clever and knowledgeable but with romantic spirit in her loves'.⁷

Catherine and Potemkin were suddenly inseparable. When they were not together, even when they were just in their own apartments, a few yards apart, they wrote to each other manically. They were both highly articulate. Fortunately for us, words were enormously important to them. Sometimes they sent several notes a day, back and forth: they were the equivalent of telephone calls or, even more, the e-mail of the Internet. Being secret love letters that often dealt with state affairs as well, they were usually unsigned. Potemkin's handwriting, a surprisingly fine and scratchy hand for such a big man, gets progressively worse as times goes on until it is almost illegible in any language by his death. The letters are in a mixture of Russian and French, sometimes almost randomly; at other times, matters of the heart were in French, those of state in Russian. A wealth of these letters have survived, a record of a lifelong love and political partnership. Some belong in that century, but others are so modern they could have been written by a pair of lovers today. Some could have been written only by an empress and a statesman; others speak the timelessly trivial language of love. There are even complete conversations: 'Go, my dove, and be happy,' wrote Catherine to Potemkin in one letter. He departed. When he returned, Catherine received this: 'Mother, we are back, now it's time for supper.' To this she replied: 'Good God! Who might have thought you would return?'⁸

Catherine addressed her lover as 'my darling soul', 'my heart', 'sweetheart' and 'bijou'. Later she often used the traditional Russian 'batushka' or 'bat- inka' - or 'papa' - and endless diminutives of Grigory: 'Grisha', 'Grishenka', 'Grishenok', even 'Grishefishenka'. At the height of their love, her names for him become even more colourful: 'My golden pheasant', 'Golden cockerel', 'Dearest dove', 'Kitten', 'Little Dog', 'Tonton', 'dear little heart', 'Twin Soul', 'Little parrot', 'part-bird, part-wolf', and lots of others that combine his force with his sensitivity. If he was playing up, she ironically brought him down to size as 'Dear Sir' or 'Dear Lieutenant-General' or 'Your Excellency'. If she was giving him a new title, she liked to address him accordingly.

Potemkin virtually always addressed Catherine as 'Matushka', or 'Little Mother', or 'Sovereign Lady' or both. In other words, he deliberately used the old Russian way of addressing a tsarina rather than calling her Katinka, as some of her later lovers did. This was due not to a lack of intimacy but rather to Potemkin's reverence for his Sovereign. For example, he made the courier who brought the Empress's notes kneel until he had written the reply, which amused Catherine with its romanticism: 'Write please, has your Master of Ceremonies brought my messenger to you today and has he knelt as he usually does?'

Potemkin always worried that the letters could be stolen. The diligent Empress burned some of his earlier love letters as soon as she read them. Those that survive from this period were mostly her letters, or his letters that she sent back to him with an addendum. So we have far more of hers. Later, most of his letters survived because they became state as well as personal papers. The passionate Russian treasured his in a scruffy wad, tied up with string and often secreted in his pocket, close to his heart, so that he could read and reread them. 'Grishenka, good morning,' she began a letter probably in March 1774, '... I am in good health and slept well ... I am afraid you will lose my letters: someone will steal them from your pocket ... They'll think they are banknotes and pocket them.'⁹ But, luckily for us, he was still carrying them around when he died seventeen years later. They had nicknames for all the main courtiers, which sometimes are hard to interpret, and also a secret coded language possibly so that Potemkin could tell her in what way he would like to make love to her.

'My dove, good morning,' she greeted him typically. 'I wish to know whether you slept well and whether you love me as much as I love you.'¹⁰ Sometimes they were as short as this: 'Night darling, I'm going to bed.'¹¹

When the court returned to town from Tsarskoe Selo on 9 April, Potemkin moved out of Yelagin's house, where he had been living since he became the Empress's lover, into his newly decorated apartments in the Winter Palace: 'they are said to be splendid', Countess Sievers reported the next day. Potemkin was now a familiar sight around the town: 'I often see Potemkin who rushes around in a coach and six.' His fine carriage, expensive horses and speed became elements of his public image. If the Empress went out, Potemkin was usually in attendance. When Catherine went to the theatre on 28 April, 'Potemkin was in the box,' noticed Countess Sievers. Royalty, indeed some­times the entire audience, often talked throughout the play - Louis XV irritated Voltaire with this royal habit. Here, Potemkin 'talked to the Empress all the way through the play; he enjoys her greatest confidence.'¹²

Potemkin's new rooms were directly beneath Catherine's in the Winter Palace. Both their apartments looked out on to the Palace Square and into an internal courtyard, but not on to the Neva river. When Potemkin wished to visit - which he did, unannounced, whenever he liked - he came up (as Orlov had come down) the spiral staircase, as always decorated with green carpets. Green was the colour of amorous corridors - for the staircase linking Louis XV's apartments to the boudoir of the Marquise de Pompadour was green too.

Potemkin was given apartments in all the imperial palaces, including the Summer Palace in town and Peterhof outside, but they were most often at the Catherine (or Great) Palace at Tsarskoe Selo, where Potemkin reached the imperial bedroom by crossing a corridor so chilly that their letters often warn each other against traversing this arctic tundra. 'Sorry you're sick,' she wrote. 'It is a good lesson for you: don't go barefoot on staircases. If you want to get rid of it, take a little tobacco.'¹³ They rarely spent the night together (as Catherine did with some later favourites), because Potemkin liked to gamble and talk late and lie in all morning, while the Empress awoke early. She had the metabolism of a tidy German schoolmistress, though with a strong vein of sensuality; his was that of a wild frontiersman.

At Catherine's intimate evenings, Potemkin often burst in, unannounced, dishevelled in a Turkish dressing gown or some other species of wrap, usually with nothing underneath so that his hairy chest and legs were quite visible. Whatever the weather, he would be barefoot. If it was cold, he threw on a fur cloak over the top which gave him the look of a giant who could not decide if he was a brute or a dandy. In addition to all this, he liked to wear a pink bandana round his head. He was an Oriental vision far from the Voltairean tastes of the Court, which was why she called him 'bogatr', the knightly Slavic hero from the mythology of Rus. Even in the earliest days of the affair, Potemkin knew that he was different from everybody else: if summoned, he might languidly decide not to turn up. He appeared in the Empress's rooms when it suited him and never bothered to be announced, nor waited to be summoned: he lumbered in and out of her apartments like an aimless bear, sometimes the wittiest member of the party, other times silently, not even bothering to acknowledge the Empress herself.

His tastes were 'truly barbaric and Muscovite' and he liked 'nothing better than the plain food of his people, particularly Russian pastries, like pirozki, and raw vegetables', which he kept at his bedside.¹⁴ When he came upstairs, he would often be nibbling apples, turnips, radishes, garlic, behaving in the Winter Palace exactly as he had as a boy wandering with serf children through Chizhova. The political significance of the Prince's choice of nibble was as natural and deliberate in its Russian rusticity as Walpole's red Norfolk apples were of his earthy Englishness.

Potemkin's uncouth behaviour shocked the usually Francophile courtiers and the fastidious ambassadors, but when he felt like it he appeared in formal or military uniform with the perfect grace and immaculate presentation of a dapper courtier. Everything with him was a battle of extremes. If he was thoughtful or brooding, as he was very often, he would bite his nails to the quick: he was to suffer terribly from hangnail for his whole life, so that the letters between the two rulers of the Empire would often be distracted from laws and wars by the state of his fingertips. 'The greatest nailbiter in the Russian Empire', was what Catherine called him. 'The Cyclops', wrote Alex­ander Ribeaupierre, 'has a charming habit. He bites his nails with frenzy right down to the skin.'¹⁵ If it was not his nails, it was anything else close within reach. At the Little Hermitage, where the Empress had written out a list of rules to enforce informality, she added a special rule aimed at her Potemkin. 'You are requested to be cheerful,' went Rule Three, 'without however destroying, breaking or biting anything.'¹⁶

Nonetheless Potemkin took over Catherine's apartments too: he put a huge Turkish divan in her salon so he could lounge around in his dressing gown - 'Mister Tom [Catherine's English greyhound] is snoring very deeply behind me on the Turkish divan General Potemkin has introduced,'¹⁷ Catherine told Grimm rather proudly. His effects were strewn around her neat rooms - and she admired his untamed, almost Bohemian, nonchalance: 'How much longer will you leave things in my rooms that belong to you!', she wrote to him. 'Please do not throw your handkerchiefs all over the shop in your Turkish fashion. Many thanks for your visit and I love you a lot.'¹⁸

It is impossible to reduce a friendship yet alone a love to its components. But, if anything, their relationship was based on laughter, sex, mutually admired intelligence, and power in an order that changed all the time. His wit had made her laugh when Orlov presented him twelve years before - and that continued throughout their lives. 'Talking of originals who make me laugh and above all of General Potemkin,' Catherine told Grimm on 19 June that year, 'who is more a la mode than any one else and who makes me laugh so much I could burst my sides.'¹⁹ Their letters were pervaded as much by her guffaws as by the force of their ambition and attraction: 'Darling, what stories you told me yesterday! I can't stop laughing when I think of them. What happy times I am spending with you!'¹⁰

There were lots of games that involved Potemkin competing with Mister Tom to see who could unleash more disorder in the imperial apartments. Her letters to Grimm are filled with Potemkin's antics including his covering himself with Mister Tom's little rug, a most incongruous sight: 'I'm sewing a new bed-blanket for Thomas ... that General Potemkin pretends to steal from him.'²¹ Later Potemkin was to introduce a badly behaved monkey.

She was never bored with Potemkin and always bored without him: he was protean, creative and always original. When she had not seen him for a while, she grumbled: 'I'm bored to death. When will I see you again?' But, as so often happens in love affairs, the laughter and the love-making seemed to lead inexorably to each other. Her sexual happiness shines through her letters. The affair was highly sexual. She was extremely proud of his sex appeal to other women and his record of female conquests. 'I don't wonder that there are so many women attributed to you,' she wrote to him. 'It seems to me that you are not an ordinary person and you differ from everyone else in everything.'²²

Darling I think you really thought I would not write today. I woke up at five and now it is seven, I will write ... I have given strict orders to the whole of my body, down to the last hair to stop showing you the smallest sign of love. I have locked up my love in my heart under ten locks, it is suffocating there and I think it might explode. Think about it, you are a reasonable man, is it possible to talk more nonsense in a few lines? A river of absurdities flows from my head, I do not understand how you can bear a woman with such incoherent thoughts. Oh Monsieur Potemkin! What a trick have you played to unbalance a mind, previously thought to be one of the best in Europe. It is time, high time, for me to become reasonable. What a shame! What a sin! Catherine II to be the victim of this crazy passion ... one more proof of your supreme power over me. Enough! Enough! I have already scribbled such sentimental metaphysics that can only make you laugh. Well, mad letter, go to that happy place where my hero dwells ... Goodbye, Giaour, Muscovite, Cossack .. .²³

This is how she felt, probably during March 1774, when she woke early, the morning after a tryst with Potemkin, who was still asleep in his apartments. The roguish names she gave him - the 'Cossack', 'giaour' (the pejorative Turkish for a non-Moslem), 'Lion of the Jungle', 'Golden Tiger', 'Golden Cockerell' and 'Wolf' - may refer to sexual energy. She even called him 'Pugachev' of all things, presumably meaning ferocious, energetic, and unbridled like a Cossack.

In these months, they were sharing everything; their meetings seem to have been frantic sessions of laughter, love-making and political planning, one after another, because both enjoyed all three. The sex was instantly mixed with politics. 'I love you very much,' she began a letter, some time in April, 'and when you caressed me, my caress always hurries to answer you ... Don't forget to summon Pavel [P. S. Potemkin, his cousin, who was being sent to assist in suppressing Pugachev]: when he arrives, it will be necessary to do two things'²⁴ - and on she went on to discuss the measures against the rebellion.

Catherine was addicted to him: one night when he did not come to visit her, she actually 'got up from my bed, dressed myself and went to the library towards the doors so that I might wait for you, where I stood for two hours in the draught; and then at 11 o'clock went to bed in misery where, thanks to you, I had not slept for five nights.'²⁵ The vision of the Empress waiting outside Potemkin's room for two hours in her dressing gown and bonnet gives us some idea of her passion for him. There were the inevitable rumours of Potemkin's elephantine sexual equipment and this may explain the per­sistent myth that Catherine took a cast of his formidable member to console herself during his increasingly long absences in the south.²⁶ This ranks in terms of historical veracity with the other malicious smears against Catherine, but stories of Potemkin's 'glorious weapon' found their way into the homo­sexual mythology of St Petersburg.[20]

If he was busy, she respected his privacy, even though she was the Empress. One day, she could not resist visiting him in his apartments. She ventured downstairs but as she approached, 'I saw through the doorway the back of a clerk or an adjutant and I fled at top speed. I love you all the time with all my soul.'²⁷ This also shows how carefully the Empress had to behave in front of clerks and servants in her own palaces. Catherine complained repeatedly about her love for him making her lose her reason, the governing ideal of this devotee of Voltaire and Diderot. This Enlightened ruler in the Age of Reason revelled in the swooning language of schoolgirl silliness: 'When you are with me, closing my eyes is the only way not to lose my mind; the alternative which would make me laugh for the rest of my life would be to say, "My eyes are charmed by you."' Was she referring to his romantic song to her? 'My stupid eyes gaze at you; I become silly and unable to reason.' She dreamed about him: 'A strange thing happened to me. I have become a somnambulist' - and she recounted how she imagined meeting 'the most fascinating of men'. Then she awoke: 'now I am looking everywhere for this man of my dreams ... How I treasure him more than the whole world! ... Darling, when you meet him, give him a kiss for me.'²⁸

Downstairs in the Winter Palace on the basement floor, beneath Catherine's chapel, there was her Russian bath - the banya - where much of their love affair seems to have taken place.*

'My dear fellow, if you want to eat some meat, everything's ready in the bath. But I beg you not to swipe any food from there because everyone will know that we're cooking in there.'²⁹ After his promotion in the Guards in March 1774, Catherine writes:

Good morning Mr Lieutenant-Colonel, how are you feeling after your bath? I am well and feel very jolly thanks to you. As soon as you left, do you know what we talked about? It is easy to guess, seeing how intelligent you are: about you, my darling! Good things were said about you, you were found beyond comparison. Goodbye, will you look after the regiment and the officers all day? As to me, I know what I am going to do. I will think - of whom? Of him, it is true that the thought of Grisha never leaves me.. .³°

Akhmatova and a handful of others. Somov, according to O. Remizov, the author of The Other Petersburg, told them how his father, the Curator, had discovered a magnificent lifesize cast of Potemkin's member in Catherine's collection. When the others did not believe him, the men were invited into the other room where they admired, with the bated breath of true connoisseurs, 'the glorious weapon of Potemkin', cast in porcelain, which lay wrapped in cottonwool and silk in a wooden box. It was then returned to the Hermitage, where, one must add, it has never been seen again. When this author recently visited the Hermitage to find Potemkin's collection, no one knew of it. But it is a very large museum. * Today the banya, like their apartments, does not exist. They were destroyed in the fire of 1837. But from the outside we can see the chapel by the golden dome and cross. Now the banya is the Egyptian section of the Hermitage Museum. It has the cool dampness of a bathhouse even today.

One day, Potemkin arrived back at the Palace. 'Dear matuskha, I have just arrived but I am so frozen that I cannot even get my teeth warm,' he announced to her. 'First I want to know how you are feeling. Thank you for the three garments and I kiss your feet.' We can imagine the messengers or ladies-in- waiting scampering back and forth down the miles of corridors in the Winter Palace bearing Catherine's reply: 'I rejoice that you are back, my dear. I am well. To get warm: go to the bath; it has been heated today.'³¹ Later the servant brought her the news that Potemkin had finished his bath. So the Empress sent back another note: 'My beauty, my darling, whom nothing resembles, I am full of warmth and tenderness for you and you will have my protection as long as I live. You must be, I guess, even more handsome than ever after the bath.'³²

Lovers tend to share the details of their health: Potemkin and Catherine shared theirs through their lives. ''Adieu monsieur,' she scribbled one morning before going out, 'how did you sleep? How is your fever? It would be so nice to sit and talk.'³³ When his fever eased, she tempted him back. 'You will see a new routine,' she promised. 'At first I will receive you in my boudoir, I will make you sit down near the table and there you will be warm and so will not get a cold ... And we will start to read a book and I will let you go at half past ten.. Л³⁴

When he was better, it was her turn to be ill: 'I slept very well but not much; I've got a headache and pain in my chest. I don't know if I'll go out today. If I do go out, it's only because I love you more than you love me and I can prove it as 2+2=4.1 will go to see you. Not every person is so clever, so handsome, so lovely as you are.'³⁵

Potemkin himself was a notorious hypochondriac. But even when he was ill he was always in a state of nervous tension, so that sometimes Catherine assumed the tyrannical tone of a brisk German matron to calm him down: 'Really, it is time to settle down to the right order of things. Be quiet and let me be quiet too. I tell you sincerely that I'm most sympathetic about your illness but I will not spoil you by words of tenderness.'³⁶ When he really was sick: 'My beloved soul, precious and unique, I can find no words to express my love for you. Don't be upset about your diarrhoea - it will clean up the bowels well .. Л³⁷ Bowels particularly resonate through the letters of that century.

When she herself came down with diarrhoea, she was concerned, like any woman would be, that her lover did not startle her in an undignified position. 'If you really must see me, send somebody to tell me; since six this morning I have had the most atrocious diarrhoea.' Besides she did not want to visit him down the icy Tsarskoe Selo corridor: 'I am sorry but passing through the non- heated corridor ... would only make my aches worse ... I'm sorry you're ill. Try to be quiet, my friend, that is the best cure.'³®

Catherine was thrilled to have found a partner who could be an equal of sorts: 'My darling, the time I spend with you is so happy. We pass four hours, boredom vanishes and I don't want to part from you. My dearest friend, I LOVE YOU SO MUCH, you are so handsome, clever, jovial and funny; when I am with you I attach no importance to the world. I have never been so happy. Very often I want to keep my feelings from you but usually my heart just blabs out my passion.'³⁹ But even in these early idyllic days of this great love Potemkin was already tormented by his contradictory appetites: a childish hunger for attention and love versus a wild yearning for freedom and independence.

Catherine's solution to the first problem was to spoil Potemkin day and night with her attention, which he sucked up, for he was quite as greedy for love as she was. The Empress of all the Russias could not humble herself enough before this proud Russian: 'My dear dove, my precious friend, I must write to you to keep my promise. Please know that I love you and this shouldn't surprise anyone. For you, one would do the impossible and so I'll be either your humble maid or your lowly servant or both at once.⁴⁰ Potemkin constantly demanded more and more attention. He wanted to know she was always thinking about him. If not, he sulked.

'I never forget you,' she reassured 'her beloved friend' after one of his moods. 'As soon as I finished listening to reports, which took three hours, I wanted to send somebody to you, especially as it was not yet ten o'clock and I was afraid of waking you up before. As you see, your anger has no foundation ... Darling I love you like my soul.'⁴¹ If she was truly angry, she let him know it: 'Fool! I am not ordering you to do anything! Not deserving this coldness, I blame it on our deadly enemy, your spleen!'⁴² She indulged his moods, finding his passion somewhat flattering, and tried to understand his torments: 'You are talking nonsense, my darling. I love you and I'll love you for ever in spite of yourself.' Even more sweetly: 'Batinka, come to see me so that I can calm you with my endless caresses.'⁴³ Her role is often to sooth this angry and frustrated man with her love.

Potemkin's moods were so changeable that the two played games with each other. 'Was there anything on that sheet?', she wrote, pretending not to have read one of his raging notes. 'Certainly reproaches, for Your Excellency has sulked all evening and I, brokenhearted, sought your caresses in vain ... The quarrel took place the day before yesterday when I tried in all sincerity to have it out with you about my plans that... could be very useful to you. Last night, I confess, I deliberately did not send anyone ... But when you had not arrived by nine o'clock I sent for news of your health. Then you turned up but with a sulky face. I pretended not to notice your bad mood which ended by really upsetting you ... Wait darling, let my wounded heart heal again, tenderness will return as soon as we grant each other an audience.'⁴⁴

Perhaps it was after this that Potemkin sent her a blank piece of paper. The Empress was hurt yet somewhat amused and she rewarded him with an almost complete encyclopaedia of his nicknames: 'This is not April Fool's Day to send me a blank sheet. Probably ... you have done it not to spoil me too much. But ... I don't guess the meaning of your silence either. Yet I am full of tenderness for you, giaour,, Muscovite, Pugachev, golden cockerel, peacock, cat, pheasant, golden tiger, lion in the jungle.'⁴⁵

Catherine concealed an obsessive emotional neediness - 'my cruel ten­derness' - beneath her cool German temperament, which was enough to suffocate any man, let alone the impossibly restless Potemkin. Rewarded lavishly, rising fast, spoilt by the woman he loved, he was such a bundle of nerves, poetical melodrama and Slavic contrariness that he could never relax and just be happy: 'Calmness is for you a state your soul cannot bear.' He needed space to breathe. His restlessness attracted her, but she could not help finding it insulting: 'I came to wake you up and ... I see you are out. Now I understand this sleep of yours was just an excuse to get rid of me. In town, you spent hours with me ... whereas here I can only see you for short moments. Giaour, Cossack, Muscovite, you are always trying to avoid me! ... You can laugh about me but I do not laugh when I see you bored in my company .. Л⁴⁶ But Potemkin was as manipulative as Catherine herself. Whether it was pride or restlessness that made him avoid her, he liked to let her know it. 'I'll never come to see you if you're avoiding me,'⁴⁷ she wrote pathetically on one occasion. Potemkin's quicksilver mind was easily bored, though he never tired of Catherine's company. They had too much in common.

It was difficult for a traditional Russian like Potemkin, even one educated in the classics of the Enlightenment, to maintain an equal relationship with a woman not only more powerful but also so sexually independent. Potemkin's behaviour was selfishly indulgent but he was in a difficult situation with enormous pressures on him, politically and personally. That is why he tor­mented Catherine. He was obsessively jealous of other men, which was foolish given her absolute devotion to him. The role of official lover was not easy on a masterful man.

First he was jealous of Vassilchikov. Now Catherine gave him the sat­isfaction of negotiating the terms of departure - or pay-off for 'Iced Soup'. 'I am handing over the question of deciding to someone far cleverer than me ... I ask you to be moderate.' Her letter gives us a fascinating glimpse into her generosity: 'I will not give him more than two villages,' she informed Potemkin. 'I have given him money four times but I don't remember how much. I think it was 60,000 ...'. Potemkin along with his ex-host Yelagin arranged a most generous deal for Vassilchikov, though it was positively meagre compared to what was given to his successors. Vassilchikov, who had already left the Winter Palace to stay with his brother, now received a fully decorated mansion, 50,000 roubles for setting up house, 5,000 roubles a year pension, villages, tableware, linen and a twenty-place silver service, no doubt including bowls for frozen soup. Poor 'kept' Vassilchikov humiliatingly had to 'bow low' and thank Potemkin - but he had reason to be grateful.⁴⁸ This was an early example of Potemkin's lack of personal or political vindictiveness. However, he remained tortured by the inherent humiliation of his own position: Catherine could dispense with him as she had dispensed with Iced Soup.

'No Grishenka,' she replied in French after a row, 'it is impossible for me to change as far as you are concerned. You must be fair to yourself: can one love anybody after having known you? I think there is not a man in the world that could equal you. All the more so since my heart is constant by nature and I will say even more: generally, I do not like change.' She was sensitive about her reputation for 'wantonness':

When you know me better you will respect me for I assure you I am respectable. I am very truthful, I love truth, I hate changes, I suffered horribly in the last two years, I burned my fingers, I will not return to that... I am very happy. If you go on letting yourself be upset by this sort of gossip, do you know what I shall do? Lock myself up in my room and see no one but you. When necessary I could do something that extreme and I love you beyond myself.⁴⁹

Her patience was saintly but not inexhaustible: 'If your silly bad temper has left you, kindly let me know for it seems to persist. Since I've given you no reason for such tenacious anger, it seems to me that it has gone on far too long. Unfortunately, it is only I who find it too long, for you are a cruel Tartar!'⁵⁰

Their relationship thrived on his wild mood swings, but they were very exhausting. Somehow his appalling behaviour seemed to keep him Catherine's respect and love, even though his moods were openly manipulative. Catherine was excited by his passions and complimented by his jealousy, but, lacking restraint, he sometimes went too far. He threatened to kill any rivals for her heart. 'You ought to be ashamed of yourself,' she ticked him off. 'Why did you say that anyone who takes your place would die? It is impossible to compel the heart by threats ... I must admit there is some tenderness in your misgivings ... I've burned my fingers with the fool [Vassilchikov]. I feared ... the habit of him would make me unhappy and shorten my life ... Now you can read my heart and soul. I am opening them to you sincerely and if you don't feel it and see it, then you're unworthy of the great passion you have aroused in me.'⁵¹

Potemkin demanded to know everything. He claimed there had been fifteen lovers before him. This was a rare example of an empress being accused of low morals to her face. But Catherine hoped to settle his jealousies with what she called 'A sincere confession'. This is a most extraordinary document for any age. The modern feminine tone belongs in our confessional twenty-first century, the worldly and practical morals in the eighteenth. The sentiments of romance and honesty are timeless. For an empress to explain her sex life like this is without parallel. She discussed her four lovers before him - Saltykov, Poniatowski, Orlov and Vassilchikov. She regretted Saltykov and Vassilchikov. Potemkin appeared as the giant hero, the 'bogatr' that he so resembled: 'Now, Sir Hero, after this confession, may I hope that I will receive forgiveness for my sins? As you will be pleased to see, there is no question of fifteen but only a third of that figure of which the first [Saltykov] occurred unwillingly and the fourth [Vassilchikov] out of despair, which cannot be counted as indulgence; as to the other three, God is my witness, they were not due to debauchery for which I have no inclination. If in my youth I had been given a husband whom I could love, I would have remained eternally faithful to him.'

Then she confessed her version of the truth of her nature: 'The trouble is only that my heart cannot be content even for an hour without love .. Л This was not the nymphomania that schoolboys have assigned to Catherine but an admission of her emotional neediness. The eighteenth century would have called this a statement of sensibilte; the nineteenth century would have seen it as a poetic declaration of romantic love; today, we can see that it is only one of part of a complex, passionate personality.

Their love for each other was absolute, yet Potemkin's turbulence and the demands of power meant that it was always stormy. Nonetheless, Catherine finished her Confession with this offer: 'If you wish to keep me for ever, show as much friendship as affection and continue to love me and to tell me the truth.'⁵²

8

POWER

She is crazy about him. They may well be in love because they are exactly the same.

Senator Ivan Yelagin to Durand de Distroff

These two great characters were made for each other,' observed Masson. 'He first loved his Sovereign as his mistress and then cherished her as his glory.'¹ Their similarity of ambitions and talents was both the foundation of their love and its flaw. The great love affair of the Empress heralded a new political era because everyone immediately appreciated that, unlike Vassilchikov or even Grigory Orlov, Potemkin was capable of exerting his power and would strive to do so at once. But, in early 1774, they had to be very careful at the most sensitive moment in Catherine's reign so far: Pugachev was still ram­paging through the territory north of the Caspian, south of the Urals, east of Moscow - and the worried nobles wanted him stopped quickly. The Turks were still not ready to negotiate and Rumiantsev's army was tired and fever- stricken. A false move against Pugachev, a defeat by the Turks, a provocation against the Orlovs, a slight to the Guards, a concession to the Grand Duke - any of these could literally have cost the lovers their heads.

Just in case they were under any illusions, Alexei Orlov-Chesmensky decided to let them know that he was carefully watching the illuminated window of the imperial bathhouse. The Orlov brothers, who had recovered so much ground since 1772, would be the first casualties of Potemkin's rise.

'Yes or no?', 'Le Balafre' asked the Empress with a slight laugh.

'About what?', replied the Empress.

'Is it love?', persisted Orlov-Chesmensky.

'I cannot lie,' said the Empress.

Scarface asked again: 'Yes or no?'

'Yes!', said the Empress finally.

Orlov-Chesmensky began to laugh again: 'Do you meet in the banyaV

'Why do you think so?'

'Because for four days we've seen the light in the window of the bath later than usual.' Then he added: 'It was clear yesterday that you've made an appointment later so you'd agree not to display affection, to put others off the scent. Good move.'² Catherine reported all this to her lover and the two revelled in it like naughty children shocking the adults. But there was always something menacing in Alexei Orlov's jokes.

Between bouts of love-making and laughter in the banya, Potemkin imme­diately began to help Catherine on both the Russo-Turkish War and the Pugachev Rebellion. These political actors often discussed how to play a scene: 'Goodbye brother,' she told him. 'Behave cleverly in public and that way, no one will know what we are really thinking.'³ Yet she felt safe with Potemkin, who gave her the feeling that everything was possible, that all their glorious dreams were achievable and that the problems of the moment could be settled.

Catherine was already under pressure about Potemkin. In early March, unidentified but powerful courtiers, including one nicknamed 'the Alchem­ist' - possibly Panin or an Orlov - advised Catherine to dispense with Potemkin: 'The man you call "the Alchemist" visited ... He tried to dem­onstrate to me the frenzy of yours and my actions and finished by asking if he wanted me to ask you to go back to the Army: to which I agreed. They are all of them at least trying to lecture me ... I didn't own up but I didn't excuse myself too so they couldn't claim that I'd lied.' But the letters also show Potemkin and Catherine's unity in political matters:

In short, I have masses of things to tell you and particularly on the subject we spoke about yesterday between noon and two o'clock; but I do not know if you are in the same mood as yesterday and I don't know either whether your words correspond always to your actions since you promised me several times you would come and you do not come ... I am thinking about you all the time. Oh! La! La! What a long letter I have written to you. Excuse me, I always forget that you don't like it. I'll never do it again.⁴

Catherine struggled to prevent Potemkin's rise from causing a rift with the Orlovs: 'I ask you - don't do one thing: don't injure and don't try to injure Prince Orlov in my thoughts because that would be ingratitude on your part. Before your arrival there was no one who was praised and loved by him as you.'⁵

Potemkin now demanded a place in government. The most important positions were war and foreign affairs. Since he had come back as a war hero from the Danube, it was natural for him to choose the War College as his target. As early as 5 March 1774, within a week of his appointment as her adjutant-general, she channelled orders to Zakhar Chernyshev, President of the College of War, Orlov's ally, through Potemkin.⁶ As ever, the Pugachev Rebellion worked to Potemkin's advantage: all governments require scape­goats for public disasters. Thus Zakhar Chernyshev, who received none of the credit for Rumiantsev's victories, bore the blame for the rampages of Pugachev, and was none too happy about it: 'Count Chernyshev is very anxious and keeps saying he will retire.'⁷ Ten days after Potemkin had delivered Catherine's messages to Chernyshev, she promoted him to lieutenant-colonel of the Preobrazhensky Guards, of which she was colonel. This had been Alexei Orlov's place, so it was a sign of the highest favour - and of the eclipse of the Orlovs. And he became captain of the sixty gorgeously attired Chevaliers-Gardes who patrolled the palaces in silver helmets and breastplates and whose Hussar or Cossack squadrons escorted her carriage.

Potemkin knew that it would be madness to take on all the factions at Court, so he tried 'to be friends with everyone', wrote Countess Rum- iantseva⁸ - especially Nikita Panin.⁹ The smug and slothful Panin looked 'more content than before' Potemkin's advent. But Count Solms did not underestimate him: 'I'm only afraid that Potemkin, who has a reputation for being sly and wicked, can benefit by Panin's kindness.'¹⁰

The favourite hoped, through Panin, to neutralize the other dangerous element in Catherine's Court - the pug-nosed, punctilious, Prussophile Heir Grand Duke Paul, now twenty, who longed to play a political role befitting his rank. Paul had disliked Prince Orlov, but he was to hate the new favourite even more, because he already sensed that Potemkin would forever exclude him from Court. Potemkin soon crossed him. Paul, a stickler for military discipline a la Prusse, bumped into the favourite when he visited his mother and grumbled about Potemkin's dress. 'My darling,' Catherine told her lover, 'the Grand Duke comes to me on Tuesdays and Fridays ... 9 to 11 o'clock ... No criticism because Count ... Andrei Razumovsky [friend of Grand Duke Paul] goes to see them in the same dress, I don't find him any worse dressed than you ...'." Fortunately, Grand Duke Paul had not encountered Potemkin in one of his half-open bearskins with the pink bandanna, which was enough to alarm anyone.

Panin undertook to stroke the increasingly bitter Tsarevich towards 'clever' Potemkin's side.¹² So Potemkin was using Panin, who thought he was using Potemkin. Countess Rumiantseva told her husband that Potemkin's return had changed everything politically - and she was right.¹³

Potemkin was concentrating on the Pugachev Rebellion. Soon after Catherine and Potemkin had become lovers and political partners, General Alexander Bibikov, setting up his headquarters at Kazan, managed to defeat Pugachev's 9,ooo-strong army on 22 March, raise the sieges of Orenburg, Ufa and Yaiksk and force the impostor to abandon his 'capital' at Berda, outside Orenburg. The favourite suggested the appointment of his cousin, Pavel Sergeievich Potemkin, the son of the man who had tried to persuade his father that he was illegitimate, to head the Secret Commission in Kazan which was to find the cause of the Rebellion - the Turks and the French were the main suspects - and punish the rebels. Potemkin and Catherine ordered Zakhar Chernyshev¹⁴ to recall Pavel Potemkin from the Turkish front. Pavel Sergeievich was a very eighteenth-century all-rounder - efficient soldier, gracious courtier, poet and multilingual scholar, the first to translate Rousseau into Russian. When he arrived in Petersburg, Catherine immediately 'told him to join Bibikov' in Kazan.¹⁵ Now that Bibikov was so close to throttling the false Peter III and Pavel Potemkin was on his way to handle the post-mortem, the lovers switched their minds to ending the Turkish War.

'Matushka,' Potemkin scrawled as he read through one of Catherine's drafts of the Russian peace terms, 'what do the articles underlined mean?' Under­neath, the Empress replied: 'It means that they have already been added and if there is debate, they will not be insisted on .. .'.^l6 The moment he arrived in the Empress's counsels, he began working with her on the instructions to be given to Field-Marshal Rumiantsev. At first the courtiers presumed that Potemkin was trying to destroy his former chief. The Potemkin legend claims that throughout his life he was viciously jealous of the few others as talented as himself. This was not so. 'It was said he was unkind to Rumiantsev,' Solms told Frederick, 'but I got to know the opposite - they are friends and he defends him against reproaches.' The Field-Marshal's wife was equally surprised that 'he tries to serve you at every opportunity ... he even favours me.'¹⁷

A forceful jolt was required to drive the Turks to the peace table, but Rumiantsev's dwindling army needed reinforcements for his planned attack across the Danube, and the authority to make peace on the spot. In late March, Potemkin persuaded Catherine 'to empower Rumiantsev and so the war was ended', as she put it herself.¹⁸ This meant that the traditional Ottoman delaying tactics would not work, because Rumiantsev was given authority to make peace on the spot, within the boundaries defined by Catherine and Potemkin, but without the need to refer back to Petersburg. The Field-Marshal was sent the new peace terms corrected by Potemkin on 10 April. By this time, the Turks had lost their appetite for talking. Ottoman decision-making, agonizingly slow at the best of times, had been delayed by the death of Sultan Mustafa III and the succession of his cautious brother Abdul-Hamid. The Turks were encouraged to keep fighting by the French and probably by the duplicitious Prussians: Frederick, while swallowing his share of the Polish Partition, was still jealous of Russian gains in the south. More than that, Turks were also heartened by the Pugachev Rebellion. So there could be no more peace without war first. Once again, Field-Marshal Rumiantsev prepared to cross the Danube.

Potemkin's first step to power was to join the State Council, the consultative war cabinet created by Catherine in 1768. His rise is always described as quick and effortless. But, contrary to historical cliche, imperial favour did not guarantee him power. Potemkin thought he was ready for the Council. Few agreed with him. Besides, all the other members of the Council were on the First or Second of the Table of Ranks; Potemkin was still on the Third. 'What am I to do? I am not even admitted to the Council. And why not? They won't have it but I'll bring things about,' raged Potemkin, 'with an openness that astonished' the French diplomat Durand.¹⁹ He tended to stun most diplomats he encountered with his outspoken asides. This was the first sign to the foreign ambassadors that Potemkin, after barely three months in Catherine's bed, wanted real power and was set on getting it.

While the Court was at Tsarskoe Selo for the summer, Catherine still refused to appoint him to the Council. He brought his determination and moodiness to bear. 'On Sunday, when I was sitting at the table near him and the Empress,' Durand recorded, 'I saw that not only did he not speak to her but that he did not even reply to her questions. She was beside herself and we for our part very much out of countenance. The silence was only broken by the Master of Horse [Lev Naryshkin] who never succeeded in animating the conversation. On rising from the table, the Empress retired alone and reappeared with red eyes and a troubled air.'²⁰ Had Potemkin got his way?

'Sweetheart,' the Empress wrote on 5 May, 'because you asked me to send you with something to the Council today, I wrote a note that must be given to Prince Viazemsky. So if you want to go, you must be ready by twelve o'clock. I'm sending you the note and the report of the Kazan Commission.'²¹ This note asking Potemkin to discuss the Secret Commission created to investigate and punish the Pugachev rebels sounds casual, but it was not: Catherine was inviting Potemkin to join the Council. Potemkin ostentatiously delivered the note to Procurator-General Viazemsky and then sat down at the top table: he was never to leave it. 'In no other country', Gunning informed London the next day, 'do favourites rise so fast. To the great surprise of the Council members, General Potemkin took his place among them.'²²

It was about this time that the Kazan Secret Commission uncovered a 'plot' to assassinate Catherine at her summer residence, Tsarskoe Selo: a captured Pugachev supporter had confessed under interrogation that assassins had been despatched. Potemkin arranged the investigation with Viazemsky: 'I think the mountain will give birth to a mouse,'²³ Catherine bravely told Potemkin. He was alarmed, but it turned out the story was probably invented under interrogation by the Commission in the south, one reason why Cath­erine was against the Russian habit of knouting suspects. She was too far away to prevent the Commission using torture on rebels, though she tried to get Bibikov to minimize its use.²⁴

On 30 May, Potemkin was promoted to General-en-Chef and Vice-Presi­dent of the College of War. It is easy for us to forget that, while this tough factional battle was going on in the councils of the Empress, Potemkin and

Catherine were still enjoying the first glow of their affair. On possibly the very same day as his promotion, the Empress sent Potemkin this note in babyish love-talk: 'General loves me? Me loves General a lot.'²⁵ The under­mined War Minister Chernyshev was 'hit so hard', reported Gunning, 'that he could not remain at his post.. .'.^2б The lame duck soon resigned to become governor of the new Belorussian provinces, taken in the First Partition of Poland. There ended the factional crisis that had started two years earlier with the fall of Prince Orlov.

Honours, responsibilities, serfs, estates and riches rained down on Potemkin: on 31 March he had been appointed Governor-General of New Russia, the huge southern provinces that bordered on the Tartar Khanate of the Crimea and the Ottoman Empire; on 21 June, he was made commander-in-chief of all irregular forces, namely his beloved Cossacks. It is hard to imagine the scale of wealth that Potemkin suddenly enjoyed. It was a world away from his upbringing in Chizhova or even his godfather's house in Moscow. A peasant soldier in the Russian infantry was paid about seven roubles a year; an officer around 300. Potemkin regularly received gifts of 100,000 roubles on his namedays, on holidays or to celebrate his particular help on a given project. He had a huge table allowance of 300 roubles a month. He lived and was served by the imperial servants in all the palaces for free. He was said to receive 12,000 roubles on the first of every month on his dressing table, but it is more likely that Catherine simply handed him thousands of roubles when she felt like it, as Vassilchikov had testified. Potemkin spent as easily as he received, finding it embarrassing on one hand, while, on the other, constantly demanding more. Yet he was still far from touching the ceiling of either his income or his extravagance. Soon there was to be no ceiling on either.²⁷

Catherine made sure that Potemkin received as many Russian and foreign medals as possible - to increase his status was to consolidate hers. Monarchs liked to procure foreign medals for their favourites. The foreign monarchs resented handing them out - especially to the lovers of usurping regicides. But, unless there was a very good excuse, they usually gave in. The cor­respondence about these awards between monarchs and Russian ambassadors are most amusing studies in the tortuously polite, almost coded euphemism that was the language of courtly diplomacy.

'Good morning sweetheart,' Catherine greeted Potemkin playfully around this time,'... I got up and sent to the Vice-Chancellor asking for the ribbons; I wrote that they were for ... General Potemkin and I planned to put them on him after mass. Do you know him? He's handsome, he's as clever as he is handsome. And he loves me as much as he's handsome and clever and I love him too .. Л²⁸ That day, he got the Russian Order of St Alexander Nevsky and the Polish Order of the White Eagle, kindly sent by King Stanislas- Augustus. There was prestige in these orders, though the higher nobility regarded them as their due: one of Potemkin's more winning characteristics was his childish delight in medals. Soon he had collected Peter the Great's Order of St Andrew; Frederick the Great sent the Prussian Black Eagle; Denmark sent the White Elephant; Sweden the Holy Seraphim. But Louis XVI and Maria Theresa refused the Holy Ghost and the Golden Fleece respectively, claiming they were only for Catholics. In London, George III was shocked by his ambassador's attempt to procure Potemkin the Garter.²⁹

'It seems the Empress is going to commit the reins of government to Potemkin,' Gunning told London. Indeed the unthinkable had happened: Potemkin was now Prince Orlov's superior. The foreign ambassadors could not swallow this. They had become so used to the Orlovs that they could not believe that they were not about to return to power at any minute. The Orlovs could not believe it either.

Prince Orlov stormed in to see Catherine on 2 June - an alarming sight, even for an Empress. 'They say', reported the well-informed Gunning, 'Orlov and Catherine had it out.'³° Prince Orlov had always been good-natured, but now he was permanently and dangerously irascible. His temper, once released, was fearsome. Indeed Catherine called him a 'madcap' and was upset by whatever Orlov said to her. But she was capable of dealing with him too: he agreed 'to travel abroad' again. She did not care. She had Potemkin: 'Good­night my friend. Send to tell me tomorrow how you are. Bye - I'm very bored without you.'³¹

On 9 June, Rumiantsev took the offensive against the Turks, despatching two corps across the Danube, which defeated their main army near Kozludzhi. This cut the Grand Vizier off from the Danubian forts. Russian cavalry galloped south past Shumla into today's Bulgaria.

Catherine and Potemkin were sorry to learn of the sudden death from fever of Pugachev's vanquisher, Bibikov, but the Rebellion seemed over and they appointed the mediocre Prince Fyodor Shcherbatov to succeed him. Suddenly, in early July, Catherine learned that Pugachev, despite his defeats, had resur­faced with another army. She sacked Shcherbatov and appointed another, General Prince Peter Golitsyn: 'I'm sending you my dear the letter that I've done to Prince Shcherbatov. Correct it please and then I'll have it read to the Council.' The Empress wrote optimistically to Potemkin, 'it'll hit the nail on the head'.³²

On 20 June, the Turks sued for peace: usually this would have meant a truce, a congress and the months of negotiating that had ruined the last peace talks. This is where Potemkin's advice to 'empower' Rumiantsev bore fruit, because the Field-Marshal set up camp in the Bulgarian village of Kuchuk- Kainardzhi and told the Turks that either they signed peace or the two armies went back to war. The Ottomans began to talk; news of a peace treaty was expected any day; Catherine's spirits rose. Everything was going so well.

A new Pugachev crisis struck Catherine in mid-July. On the nth, Pugachev appeared before the ancient and strategic city of Kazan with a swelling army of 25,000. The supposedly defeated Pugachev was not defeated at all, but he was being pursued by the true hero of the Rebellion, the tirelessly competent Lieutenant-Colonel Ivan Mikhelson. Kazan was a mere 93 miles from Nizhny Novgorod and that was just over a hundred miles from Moscow itself. The old Tartar city, conquered by Ivan the Terrible in 15 56, had 11,000 inhabitants and mainly wooden buildings. It happened that General Pavel Potemkin, the new appointee to run both the Kazan and Orenburg Secret Commissions, had arrived in Kazan on 9 July, two days before Pugachev. The old Governor was ill. Pavel Potemkin took over the command, but he possessed only 650 infantry and 200 unreliable Chuvash cavalry, so he barricaded his forces in the citadel. On the 12th, Pugachev stormed Kazan, which was razed in an infernal orgy of violence that lasted from 6 a.m. to midnight. Anyone in 'German dress' or without a beard was killed; women in 'German dress' were delivered to the pretender's camp. The city was reduced to ashes before Pugachev's army escaped, leaving Pavel Potemkin to be rescued by Mikhelson.

The Volga region was now one teeming peasant rebellion. The Rebellion had taken an even nastier turn: it had started as a Cossack rising. Now it became a savage class war, a regular jacquerie, meaning a slaughter of landowners by peasants, named after the rebellion in northern France in 1358. The regime faced the prospect of the millions of serfs massacring their masters. This was a threat not just to Catherine but to the very foundations of the Empire. Factory serfs, peasants and 5,000 Bashkir horsemen now followed the flag of the pretender. Serfs rose in village after village. Gangs of runaway slaves roamed the countryside. Rebel Cossacks galloped through the villages urging the serfs to rise.[21] On 21 July, the news of the fall of Kazan reached Catherine in Petersburg. The authorities in the centre began to panic. Would Pugachev march on Moscow?³³

The next day the Empress held an emergency Council meeting at Peterhof. She declared that she would travel directly to Moscow to rally the Empire. The Council heard this in smouldering silence. No one dared speak. The members of the Council were worried and uneasy. Catherine herself was rattled: Kazan made her seem suddenly vulnerable. Unusually for her, she showed it. Some of the magnates, especially Prince Orlov and the two Cher- nyshev brothers, bitterly resented Potemkin's rise and Panin's resurgence.

The Council was stunned by the Empress's wish to go to Moscow. Its defeated silence reflected the depth 'of the wordless depression'. Catherine turned to her senior minister, Nikita Panin, and asked his opinion of her idea. 'My answer', he wrote to his brother, General Peter Panin, 'was that it would not only be bad but disastrous,' because it smacked of fear at the top. Catherine passionately argued the benefits of her descent on Moscow. Pot­emkin backed her. The Moscow option may have been his idea because as the most old Russian among these cultured grandees, he instinctively saw Moscow as the Orthodox capital when the Motherland was in danger. Equally, he may simply have agreed with her because he was too new there to risk independence of Catherine.

The reaction of most of the Council members was almost comical: Prince Orlov refused to give an opinion at all, claiming like a child that he felt off colour, had not slept well and did not have any ideas. Kirill Razumovsky and Field-Marshal Alexander Golitsyn, a pair of 'fools', could not summon up a word. Zakhar Chernyshev 'trembled between the favourites' - Orlov and Potemkin - and managed to emit 'half-words twice'. It was recognized that there was no one of any military weight on the Volga to co-ordinate Pugachev's defeat: 'a distinguished personage' was required. But who? Orlov presumably went off to get his beauty sleep while the downhearted Council resolved nothing, other than to wait for news of the Turkish peace treaty.³⁴

Nikita Panin had an idea. After dinner, he took Potemkin aside and pro­posed that the 'distinguished personage' to save Russia was none other than his brother, General Peter Ivanovich Panin. There was something to be said for this: he was a victorious battle general with the aristocratic credentials necessary to soothe the fears of landowners. He was already in Moscow. But there was a problem with Peter Panin. He was a rude, arrogant and snobbish curmudgeon for whom the word 'martinet' might have been invented. Even for a Russian soldier in the eighteenth century, many of his loudly declared views were absurd: he was a pedant on the privileges of nobles and the minutiae of military etiquette and flaunted a stalwart belief that only men were qualified to be tsar. This harsh disciplinarian and spluttering tyrant was capable of appearing in the anteroom of his headquarters in a grey satin nightgown and a high French nightcap with pink ribbons.³⁵ Catherine loathed him, distrusted him politically and even had him under secret police sur­veillance.

So Nikita Panin, not daring to raise his brother aloud at the Council, cautiously approached Potemkin, who went straight to the Empress. She was probably furious at the very thought of it. Perhaps he persuaded her that they had little choice when they felt as if even her closest supporter were wavering. She agreed. When Nikita Panin spoke to her later, the Empress dissembled her real views and, ever the actress, graciously swore that she wanted Peter Panin to take supreme command of the Volga provinces and 'save Moscow and the internal parts of the Empire'. Nikita Panin immediately wrote to his brother.³⁶

The Panins had pulled off what was almost a coup d'etat, forcing Catherine to swallow the humiliation of the hated Peter Panin saving the Empire. They were now, in their way, as much of a threat to Catherine and Potemkin as

Pugachev. Having gulped Panin's distasteful medicine, the lovers at once realized that they had to water it down. It was to get worse before it got better: the Panins demanded massive viceregal powers for the general over all towns, courts and Secret Commissions in the four huge provinces affected, and over all military forces (except Rumiantsev's First Army, the Second Army occupying the Crimea and the units in Poland), as well as power to issue death sentences. 'You see my friend,' Catherine told Potemkin, 'from the enclosed pieces, that Count Panin wants to make his brother the dictator of the best parts of the Empire.' She was determined not to raise this 'first-class liar ... who has personally offended me, above all the mortals in the Empire'. Potemkin took over the negotiations with the Panins and the management of the Rebellion.³⁷

Catherine and Potemkin did not know that, before Kazan had fallen, Rumiantsev had signed an extremely beneficial peace with the Turks - the Treaty of Kuchuk-Kainardzhi. On the evening of 23 July, two couriers, one of them Rumiantsev's son, galloped into Peterhof with the news. Catherine's mood changed from despair to gloating enthusiasm. 'I think today is the happiest day of my life,' she told the Governor of Moscow.³⁸ The Treaty gave Russia a toehold on the Black Sea, granting the fortresses of Azov, Kerch, Yenikale and Kinburn and the narrow strip of coastline between the Dnieper and Bug rivers. Russian merchant ships could pass through the Straits into the Mediterranean. She could build a Black Sea Fleet. The Khanate of the Crimea became independent of the Ottoman Sultan. This success was to make Potemkin's achievements possible. Catherine ordered extravagant festivities. The Court moved to Oranienbaum three days later to celebrate.

This strengthened Potemkin's position with Peter Panin, who waited excitedly in Moscow for confirmation of his dictatorial powers. The surviving drafts of these powers show that Catherine and Potemkin were equally excited about cutting the Panins down to size. They certainly did not hurry: Nikita Panin now realized that he might have overplayed his hand: 'I could see from the first day that this affair was considered ... an extreme humiliation.' Potemkin was not overawed by the Panins: 'he doesn't listen to anything and doesn't want to listen but decides everything with his mind's impudence.'³⁹

When Potemkin wrote to Peter Panin a few days later with the Empress's instructions, he spelt out, with all that 'impudence', that the appointment was completely thanks to his own efforts with the Empress: 'I'm absolutely sure that Your Excellency will treat my actions as a good turn to you.'⁴⁰ General Panin received his orders on 2 August - he was only to command forces already fighting Pugachev and enjoy authority over Kazan, Orenburg and Nizhny Novgorod. Potemkin still had his tough cousin Pavel Sergeievich in Kazan as a counterbalance to the overmighty Panin: authority was split between them. Panin's job was to destroy the Pugachev forces; Pavel Potemkin was to arrest, interrogate and punish. Not all the members of the Council quite understood that Peter Panin was not to be 'dictator': when Viazemsky suggested placing Pavel Potemkin's Secret Commission under Panin, he received a laconic rebuttal in the imperial hand: 'No, because it is under me.'⁴¹

The latest news from the Volga weakened the Panins yet further. It emerged that Mikhelson had beaten Pugachev several times right after the fall of Kazan, so that the news of its sacking was out of date by the time it rocked the Council in Petersburg. Far from marching on Moscow, Pugachev escaped southwards. Catherine's political crisis had passed. The celebrations for the victory over the Turks began at Oranienbaum on the 27th with parties for the diplomatic corps. But Catherine was still busy watching the strange disturbances on the Volga.

It was always hard to tell if Pugachev was fleeing or advancing. Even his flight resembled an invasion. Rabbles rallied to him, towns surrendered, manors burned, necks snapped, bells were rung. In the remote Lower Volga, the local towns kept falling, culminating on 6 August in the sack of Saratov, where renegade priests administered oaths of allegiance to Pugachev and his wife, which undermined his imposture even more. Twenty-four landowners and twenty-one officials were hanged. But Pugachev was doing what every cornered criminal does: heading home, to the Don.

The victors swiftly fell out among themselves: Peter Panin and Pavel Pot­emkin, both arrogant and aggressive, undermined each other wherever pos­sible on behalf of their respective relations in Petersburg. This was precisely the reason Potemkin had divided their responsibilities.

Pugachev arrived in the land of the Don Cossacks before Tsaritsyn,[22] and learned the hard way that a pretender is never honoured in his own country. When he parleyed with Don Cossacks, they realized that 'Peter III' was the boy they remembered as Emelian Pugachev. They did not rally. Pugachev, still with 10,000 rebels, fled downriver and was then arrested by his own men. 'How dare you raise your hands against your emperor!', he cried. It was to no avail. The 'Amperator' had no clothes left. He was handed over to Russian forces in Yaiksk, where the Rebellion had started a year earlier. There was a glut of forceful and ambitious soldiers on the Lower Volga - Pavel Potemkin, Panin, Mikhelson and Alexander Suvorov - among whom there was an undignified scrummage to claim credit for capturing the 'state villain' even though none of them had actually done so. Suvorov delivered Pugachev to Peter Panin, who refused to allow Pavel Potemkin to interrogate him.⁴² Like children telling tales to their teachers, they spent August to December writing complaints to Petersburg. Often their contradictory letters arrived on the same day.⁴³ Now that the crisis was over and the lovers were in firm control, Catherine and Potemkin were half outraged, half amused by this squabbling. 'My love,' wrote Catherine some time in September, 'Pavel is right. Suvorov had no more part in this [capture of Pugachev] than Thomas [her dog].'

Potemkin spoke for everyone when he wrote to Peter Panin: 'We are all filled with joy that the miscreant has come to an end.'⁴⁴

Peter Panin had the bit between his teeth. He even killed some of the witnesses. When he got his hands on the pretender himself, who had served unnoticed under him at Bender in the war, he slapped him across the face and made him kneel. He brought him out and slapped him again for every curious visitor - except Pavel Potemkin, whose job it was to question him.⁴⁵ Catherine and Potemkin neatly cut this Gordian knot by dissolving the Kazan Com­mission to create the Special Commission of the Secret Department of the Senate in Moscow, which was to arrange Pugachev's trial. They appointed Pavel Potemkin to it⁴⁶ - but not Panin. Potemkin was obviously protecting his cousin's interests, and his own, for Catherine told him: 'I hope all Pavel's quarrels and dissatisfactions come to an end when he receives my orders to go to Moscow.' In the midst of the politics, she added: 'Sweetheart, I love you very much and wish that pill would cure you of all illness. But I ask you to abstain: eat just soup and tea without milk.'⁴⁷

Peter Panin 'now decorated rural Russia with a forest of gallows', according to one modern historian.⁴⁸ 'The murderers [of officials]', declared Panin in a circular that was not approved by Catherine, 'and their accomplices shall be put to death first by cutting off their hands and feet and then their heads and placing the bodies on blocks beside thoroughfares ... those villages in which they were murdered or betrayed shall ... hand over the guilty by drawing lots, every third man to be hanged ... and if by this means they still do not give them up, then every 100^th man by lot shall actually be hanged from the rib and all remaining adults to be flogged...'.

Panin boasted to Catherine that he did not shrink from 'spilling of the damned blood of state miscreants'.⁴⁹ The hanging from the rib, which he specified, was performed on a forgotten delicacy - the glagoly, a special form of gallows in the shape of a small letter 'r' but with a longer arm, from which victims were hanged by the rib, held in place by a metal hook that was inserted behind their ribs and threaded through.⁵⁰ This macabre exhibition was the last thing Catherine wanted Europe to see, but Panin claimed that it was only to act as a deterrent. Rebels were trussed up on gallows on rafts and sent down the Volga, their corpses decaying on these amphibious gibbets. In fact, far fewer miscreants were executed that one might expect, though there must have been many cases of rough justice. Only 324, many of them renegade priests and nobles, were officially sentenced to death, which, considering the scale of the Rebellion, compares well to the English reprisals after the 1745 Battle of Culloden.⁵¹

The Yaik Cossack Host where the Rebellion had begun was abolished and renamed. In a foretaste of the Soviet fashion for renaming places after their leaders, Catherine ordered that Zimoveyskaya stanitsa,⁵² Pugachev's home village on the far bank of the Don, should be renamed Potemkinskaya, erasing, in Pushkin's elegant words, 'the gloomy remembrance of the rebel with the glory of a new name that was becoming dear to her and the Motherland'.⁵³

The 'state miscreant' was despatched to Moscow, staring like a wild animal out of a specially constructed iron cage. When he arrived at the beginning of November, the angry Muscovites were already relishing the prospect of a particularly sadistic execution. This began to worry Catherine, who knew that the Rebellion was already an embarrassing blight on her Enlightened reputation.

Catherine and Potemkin secretly resolved to reduce the cruelty of the execution - admirable at a time when judicial killing in England and France was still astonishingly vicious. Procurator-General Viazemsky was sent to Moscow, accompanied by the 'Senate secretary', Sheshkovsky, the feared knout-wielder who, Catherine chillingly informed Pavel Potemkin, 'has a special gift with common people'. However, Pugachev was not tortured.⁵⁴

Catherine tried to oversee as much of the trial as she could. She sent Potemkin her Pugachev Manifesto to read - if he was not too ill. The hypochondriac did not reply, so the Empress, who obviously needed his approval, sent him another note: 'Please read it and tell us now what you make of it: is it good or bad?' Later that day or the next, the Empress became impatient - 'it's twelve o'clock but we haven't got the end of the Manifesto so it can't be written out in time and can't be sent to the Council ... If you like the drafts, we ask you to send them back ... If you don't like them, correct them.' Potemkin may really have been ill or perhaps he was working on the peace celebrations to be held in Moscow. 'My dear soul, you begin new enterprises every day.'⁵⁵

The trial opened on 30 December in the Great Kremlin Hall. On 2 January ¹77 55 Pugachev was sentenced to be quartered and beheaded. There was no 'drawing', or disembowelling while alive, in Russia: that was part of English civilization. However, the 'quartering' meant that all four limbs would be cut off while the victim was alive. Muscovites were enthusiastically anticipating this grisly spectacle. Catherine had other ideas. 'As regards executions,' she wrote to Viazemsky, 'there must be no painful ones.' On 21 December, she was at last able to tell Grimm that 'in a few days, the farce of the "Marquis de Pugachev" will be finished. When you receive this letter, you can count on it that you won't hear any more talk about that particular gentleman.'⁵⁶