Prince of Princes -The Life of Potemkin

This elegant skulduggery reached a new low when Harris delivered his second memorandum to Potemkin, who was said to have languidly placed it in his dressing-gown pocket or 'under his pillow'. Somehow, it was removed and given to the French charge, Corberon, and thence to Panin. The Chevalier de la Teyssoniere, basse-cour hanger-on, played some part, but it was another Frenchwoman, a mistress of the Prince and a governess of his nieces, Made­moiselle Guibald, who actually stole the document. It was later claimed that Panin then added notes contradicting the British arguments and left it on Catherine's desk so that she would believe the notes were Potemkin's advice. This is obviously designed to give Potemkin's house a disorderly air, hence most historians have dismissed it, and Guibald, as legends. Catherine would certainly have known Potemkin's handwriting and views, making the notes an unlikely detail. But Teyssoniere was certainly skulking around Potemkin's Court and Tatania Engelhardt's letters to her uncle reveal that Miss Guibald did exist. Besides, virtually every member of Potemkin's household would have been receiving bribes from somebody, which is probably why Guibald was not dismissed. She remained in Potemkin's household for years after. The story may have some truth after all.²⁸

Serenissimus did not spend all his time with Harris. In the midst of this intrigue, a European phenomenon arrived in Petersburg. The soi-disant Count Alessandro di Cagliostro, accompanied by a pretty wife and posing as a Spanish colonel, set up shop as a healer, purveyor of the Egyptian Masonic rite, alchemist, magus and necromancer. The famous charlatan's real name was probably Giuseppe Balsamo of Sicily, but this squat, swarthy and balding Sicilian with black eyes and a throbbing forehead clearly possessed plenty of chutzpah and charisma.

The Age of Reason had undermined Religion, but there was a natural yearning for spirituality to fill the void. This was one reason for the fashion for Freemasonry, manifested in both rationalist and occult varieties. The latter spread rapidly in all its esoteric diversity - hypnotism, necromancy, alchemy, Kabbalism, preached in cults such as Martinism, Illuminism, Rosicrucianism and Swedenborgism. These ideas were propagated through Masonic lodges and by a remarkable series of healers and charlatans. Some like Swedenborg,

Mesmer and Lavater were magi whose knowledge of human nature, if not healing powers, helped people in an era when doctors and scientists could explain little.²⁹ Many were just charlatans like the lover Casanova and the notorious George Psalmanazar, travelling Europe deceiving innocent noble­men with their tales of the Philosopher's Stone and the Fountain of Youth. They always presented themselves as exotically titled men of wealth, taste and mystery. Each offered an enticing mixture of common sense, practical medical advice, promises of eternal youth, guides to the after-life - and the ability to convert base metals, and even urine, into gold.

Their doyen, the so-called Comte de Saint-Germain, who claimed to be almost two thousand years old and to have witnessed the Crucifixion in his youth (his valet remembered it too), impressed Louis XV by creating, out of ether, a diamond worth 10,000 livres. A substantial chunk of Europe's aristocracy at this time was somehow involved in these cults of Freemasonry.

Cagliostro had dazzled Mittau, capital of Courland, but he then had to leave swiftly. Now he hoped to reproduce his success in Petersburg. As Catherine told Grimm, the hierophant 'came at a good moment for him when several Masonic lodges wanted to see spirits ...'. The 'master sorcerer' duly provided as many as required, along with all sorts of tricks involving disappearing money, sales of mysterious potions and 'chemical operations that don't work'. She especially laughed at his claim to be able to create gold out of urine and offer eternal life.

Nonetheless Cagliostro conducted healings and won a distinguished fol­lowing for his Egyptian Masonic rite. Corberon and courtiers like Ivan Yelagin and Count Alexander Stroganov ardently subscribed to the necromancer's powers. Many Russian nobles joined Masonic lodges. Some gradually evolved into something like an anti-Catherinian opposition, which explained her deep suspicion of Freemasonry.

Potemkin attended some of Cagliostro's seances but never believed in them, remaining one of the few senior courtiers who did not become a Mason. He and Catherine thoroughly enjoyed joking about Cagliostro's tricks.³⁰ Potemkin's real interest was in Countess Cagliostro. Serenissimus is said to have enjoyed an affair with the hierophant's wife, born Lorenza, renamed Serafina and sometimes calling herself Princess di Santa Croce. This may have damaged Cagliostro more than he realized. Catherine teased Potemkin about the time he spent at their house: perhaps he should learn to keep Cagliostro's spirits in check ... Did she mean the ersatz Princess-Countess?³¹

So often did he call on Cagliostro's luxurious, indebted establishment that, according to legend, one of Potemkin's highborn Russian mistresses decided to bribe the adventuress to give him up. In one of those poignant, almost respectful meetings between noblewoman and courtesan, the former paid Serafina 30,000 roubles, quite a sum, to leave. Potemkin was flattered. He told Cagliostro's girl that she could stay, let her keep the money - and paid back the full amount to the noblewoman. Some silly legends³² claim that the 'noblewoman' was the Empress herself.

Debts and truth had a way of catching up with such characters, even in that louche century. Soon afterwards, the Spanish Ambassador complained that Cagliostro was neither grandee of Spain nor colonel. Catherine cheerfully told Grimm that the sorcerer and his 'Countess' had been thrown out of Russia.*

When Panin summoned Harris in early February 1780 to read him a rejection of the British proposals for an alliance, Sir James rushed over to Potemkin to learn the reasons. Potemkin clearly (for once) stated that Catherine's fear of 'embarking on a fresh war was stronger even than her thirst for glory'. Harris did not seem to hear. Potemkin explained that the new favourite, Lanskoy, was desperately ill, which had 'unhinged' the Empress. Sir James believed him when he claimed: 'My influence is temporarily suspended.' Harris criti­cized these 'timid resolutions', at which 'The Prince caught fire' and boasted that before he slept he 'would have a trial of skill whether there was in the empire any influence more powerful than his'. Harris was most encouraged, but typically Potemkin became ill and did not receive him again for weeks.

Serenissimus then confided in the credulous Englishman that the Empress was an over-cautious woman capable of feminine hysteria about her mignons. Potemkin himself alternated between expressions of political impotence and explosions of bombast. He attacked Panin, that 'indolent and torpid min­ister' - while himself lying in bed in the middle of the day. Harris was almost bewitched by Potemkin's friendship, flamboyance and apparent honesty.³³

In February 1780, Serenissimus summoned Harris to announce, 'with an impetuous joy analogous to his character', the despatch of an armament of fifteen ships-of-the-line and five frigates 'to protect Russian trade'. But Pot­emkin must have known that this was a fatal blow to Harris's entire mission.³⁴ It was the sequel to Catherine's successful mediation in the War of the Bavarian Succession. Britain claimed the right to detain neutral ships and condemn their cargo, but had made the mistake of detaining Russian ships. This maritime highhandedness angered neutrals, including Russia. In March 1780, Catherine therefore declared the principles of neutral rights at sea in her so-called 'Armed Neutrality', designed to puncture British arrogance, increase the Russian merchant navy and raise her prestige. Harris would have to offer more to get Russian attention.

Sir James wondered if Potemkin had been bribed by France or Prussia. At the

* After Petersburg, Cagliostro toured Europe, causing a sensation everywhere, more like a pop star than a magus, but in Paris he became involved, through his patron the Cardinal de Rohan, in the Diamond Necklace Affair, the sting which so damaged Marie-Antoinette. Napoleon named it as one of the causes of the French Revolution. Cagliostro was actually found innocent in the trial that Marie-Antoinette so foolishly demanded and Louis XVI so rashly allowed, but he was ruined. He died a prisoner in 1795 in the Italian Papal fortress of San Leone.

same time, the French and Prussians suddenly thought Potemkin had been bribed by the English. This venal paranoia unleashed an orgy of bribery which must have seemed like manna from heaven to the greedy servants of Petersburg who were its main beneficiaries.

Harris was sure Corberon had bribed all the 'valets de chambre and inferior agents in the Russian houses ... being chiefly French'. Versailles was indeed determined to keep Russia out of the war and it was willing to throw money around St Petersburg to fix it - the French even boasted they had enough to buy Potemkin.³⁵ 'I almost suspect my friend's fidelity has been shaken,' Harris confided to Viscount Stormont, Secretary of State for the North. Corberon was already telling Versailles that Harris disposed of a credit of £3 6,000 and had paid 100,000 roubles to Potemkin. Orlov-Chesmensky accused the Prince of receiving 150,000 British guineas. Harris thought France was paying £4,000/5,000 to Panin's family.

At the end of March 1780, Harris could contain himself no longer. If the French were bribing 'my friend', then Britain should outbid them with a 'similar bait'. The bribe market in St Petersburg now boomed like a bourse. Reminding Stormont that he was dealing with a 'person immensely wealthy', Harris sug­gested 'as much as Torcy proposed, but without success, to Marlborough'.³⁶ Even the paymaster of Europe must have gulped.* The Prussians and Austrians were also paying court to Potemkin. Harris observed the Prussian envoy in daily conferences with Potemkin and heard he was again offering Courland or 'to insure him in the case of the Empress's demise for his person, honours and property' - that is, in the event of Paul's succession. The Austrians on the other hand were rumoured to be offering him another principality.³⁷

Was Potemkin being bribed or not? The elephantine sums of 100,000 roubles or 150,000 guineas were mentioned in late 1779, but research into 'the Secret Service Funds' shows that, by November, Harris had drawn only £1,450 and was later told off for spending £3,000. Even put together, this might have pleased Sashenka Engelhardt, but was not even table money for the Prince himself. Harris's doubts 'disappeared' - he realized that Potemkin's 'immense fortune places him above the reach of corruption'. Rich men can often be bribed with a little bit more, but Harris was probably right when he said that Potemkin could 'only be attained by strict attention to his humour and character'. This was emphasized when Catherine gave her friend £40,000 sterling, according to Harris, to thank him for his help on the Armed Neu­trality. It was a huge sum, but 'so spoilt is this singular man that he scarcely considers it worth thanks'. The Prussian Goertz agreed that Potemkin was unbribable: 'riches can do nothing - his are immense'.

Panin put all these figures into context when he disdainfully asked, 'Do you really believe that £50,000 sterling is enough to buy Prince Potemkin?'

When Potemkin heard the rumour that Harris had given him two million roubles, he despised the very idea. The Englishman was convinced of Pot­emkin's nobility. Serenissimus was too proud and too rich to be bribed.³⁸

Potemkin's tactics were telling on Panin. Both believed the other was receiving bribes. This led to a tumultuous confrontation at the Council when Potemkin accused Panin of accepting French money or, as he put it, 'the portraits of Louis XVI' are excellent to 'bet at whist'. Panin exploded that if he needed them, guineas were easier to get. Presumably Panin believed Pot­emkin was getting more than that laughable £50,000. The Empress was called to restore the peace.³⁹

Harris decided to find out if Serenissimus really supported an English alliance, so he bribed 'the favourite secretary of Prince Potemkin ... also the secretary to the Empress'. This was probably Alexander Bezborodko, who was becoming Catherine's leading factotum in foreign affairs as Panin dwindled. Stormont agreed on the offer of £500, though he added that it was rather a lot. When it came to it, Harris was fleeced of nearer £3,000, though he did get closer to the reality of Potemkin's policy. Bezborodko revealed that the monarchs of Europe, from Frederick to Joseph, were bombarding Potemkin with offers of thrones and money. No offer swayed him. He was not really zealous in the English cause, except when roused by rivalry with Panin. The 'spy' added that Potemkin lived by the 'impulse of the moment' and was quite capable of 'adopting the political principles of every country' but was keenest at that moment on Austria. There, at last, was the truth.⁴⁰

The diplomats had already heard Potemkin talking about real plans in the south. Even when discussing English fleets, Harris observed that Potemkin's 'mind is continually occupied with the idea of raising an Empire in the East' and it was he 'alone who heated and animated the Empress for this project'.⁴¹ Catherine was indeed infected with Potemkin's exciting visions. When she talked to Harris, she 'discoursed a long while ... on the ancient Greeks, of their alacrity and superiority ... and the same character being extant in the modern ones'.⁴² Corberon, who had heard it too, did not exaggerate when he wrote that 'romantic ideas here are adopted with a fury'.⁴³ But the dip­lomats did not understand the significance of Potemkin's 'romantic ideas' - his 'Greek Project' - that so excited Catherine. Serenissimus' mind was not on London, Paris, Berlin or Philadelphia. It was on Tsargrad, the city of emperors - Constantinople. The dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire was to be the dominating theme of the rest of his life and the foundation of his greatness.

PART FIVE

The Colossus

1777-1783

BYZANTIUM

I was asked to a fete which Prince Potemkin gave in his orangery ... Before the door was a little temple consecrated to Friendship which contained a bust of the Empress ... Where the Empress supped was furnished in Peking, beautifully painted to resemble a tent... it only held five or six ... Another little room was furnished with a sofa for two, embroidered and stuffed by the Empress herself.

Chevalier de Corberon, 20 March 1779

When the Ottoman Sultan, Mehmed II, took Constantinople in 1453, he rode through the streets directly to the Emperor Justinian's remarkable Church of Hagia Sophia. Before this massive tribute to Christianity, he sprinkled earth on his head to symbolize his humility before God and then entered. Inside, his sharp eyes spotted a Turkish soldier looting marble. The Sultan demanded an explanation. 'For the sake of the Faith,' replied the soldier. Mehmed slew him with his sword: 'For you the treasures and the prisoners are enough,' he decreed. 'The buildings of the city fall to me.' The Ottomans had not conquered Byzantium to lose the greatness of Constantine.

Mehmed was now able to add Kaiser-i-Rum - Caesar of Rome - to his titles of Turkish Khan, Arabic Sultan and Persian Padi-shah. To Westerners, he was not only the Grand Seigneur or the Great Turk - henceforth he was often called Emperor. From that day on, the Ottoman House embraced the prestige of Byzantium. 'No one doubts that you are the Emperor of the Romans,' George Trapezountios, the Cretan historian, told Mehmed the Conqueror in 1466. 'Whoever is legally master of the capital of the Empire is the Emperor and Constantinople is the capital of the Roman Empire ... And he who is and remains Emperor of the Romans is also Emperor of the whole earth.'¹ It was to this prize that Potemkin and Catherine now turned their attention.

The Ottoman Empire stretched from Baghdad to Belgrade and from the Crimea to Cairo and included much of south-eastern Europe - Bulgaria, Rumania, Albania, Greece, Yugoslavia. It boasted the cream of Islam's Holy Cities from Damascus and Jerusalem to the Holy Places themselves, Mecca and Medina. The Black Sea was for centuries its 'pure and immaculate virgin', the Sultan's private lake, while even the Mediterranean shores were still dominated by his ports, from Cyprus all the way to Algiers and Tunis. So it was indeed an international empire. But it was wrongly called a Turkish one. Usually the only Turkish leader in its carefully calibrated hierarchy was the Sultan himself. Ironically, the so-called Turkish Empire was a self-consciously multinational state that was built by the renegade Orthodox Slavs of the Balkans who filled the top echelons of Court, bureaucracy and the Janissaries, the Praetorian Guards of Istanbul.

There was little concept of class: while the Western knights were tying themselves in knots of noble genealogy, the Ottoman Empire was a mer­itocracy which was ruled in the Sultan's name by the sons of Albanian peasants. All that mattered was that everyone, even the grand viziers them­selves, were slaves of the Sultan, who was the state. Until the mid-sixteenth century, the sultans were a talented succession of ruthless, energetic leaders. But they were to be victims of their own Greek Project, for gradually the dirty business of ruling was conducted by their chief minister, the grand vizier, while they were sanctified by the suffocatingly elaborate ritual of the Byzantine emperors. Indeed when the French soldier Baron de Tott witnessed the cor­onation of Mustafa III in 1755, he recalled how the Sultan, surrounded by Roman plumage and even fasces, was literally dwarfed by the magnificence of his own importance. Based on the tenth-century order of ceremonies compiled by Constantine Porphyrogenitus, the blessing and curse of the Byzantines was to turn the Ottoman sultans from dynamic conquerors astride steeds at the head of armies to limp-wristed fops astride odalisques at the head of phalanxes of eunuchs. This was not all the fault of the Greek tradition.

At first there was no law of succession, which often meant accessions were celebrated with royal massacres. The new emperor would cull his brothers - sometimes as many as nineteen of them - by strangulation with a bowstring, a polite despatch that shed no imperial blood. Finally a sense of royal ecology stopped this foolish waste. Instead Ottoman princes were kept, like luxurious prisoners in the Cage, half embalmed by pleasure, half educated by neglect, half dead from fear of the bowstring. When they emerged into the light, like bleary-eyed startled animals, new sultans were terrified, until reassured by the corpses of their predecessors.

The whole state became a rigidly stratified hierarchy with the grand vizier, often of Slavic origin, at the top, with a household of 2,000 and a guard of 500 Albanians. Each top official, each pasha (literally 'the Sultan's foot'), displayed his rank in terms of horse's tails, relic of House of Othman's nomadic origins. The grand vizier displayed five; lesser pashas between one and three. Viziers wore green slippers and turbans, chamberlains red, mullahs blue. The heads and feet of the Ottomans marked their rank as clearly as pips on an epaulette. Officials wore green, palace courtiers red. All the nationalities of the Empire wore the correct slippers: Greeks in black, Armenians in violet,

Jews in blue. As for hats, the powers of the Empire were celebrated atop heads in a fiesta of bonnets crested with furs and feathers.

The sultan dwelt in a palace built on the Seraglio Point, appropriately on the Byzantine Acropolis. In Turkish style, the palace was a progression of increasingly rarefied courtyards, leading into the imperial Seraglio through a series of gateways. These gates, where Turkic justice was traditionally dis­pensed, thus became the visible symbols of Ottoman government. That is why it was known in the West as the Sublime Porte.

The lusts of the emperors were encouraged in order to deliver a rich reservoir of male heirs. Thus if the sultans looked for quality, the logic of the Harem demanded quantity. Incidentally, the eunuchs who ran the Court were apparently capable of sexual congress, merely being bereft of the means to procreate - so that they too had the run of the Harem. Just as the Palace School, which trained imperial pages who rose to run the Empire, was filled with Albanians and Serbs, so the Harem, which produced imperial heirs to rule the Empire, was filled with blonde-haired and blue-eyed Slav girls from the slave-markets of the Crimea. Until the late seventeenth century, the lingua franca of the court was, bizarrely, Serbo-Croat.

The Ottoman Sultanate was dying by strangulation - not by bowstring, but by tradition. By Potemkin's era, the sultans were constricted not just by Byzantinism but by a religious fundamentalism imposed by the Islamic court, the ulema, and by political conservatism enforced by the vested interests of court and military.

The Empire was ruled by fear and force. The sultan still had power over life and death and he used it liberally. Instant death was part of the Court's exquisite etiquette. Many grand viziers are more famous for being killed than for ruling. They were beheaded at such a rate that, despite the riches the position brought, it is surprising there were so many candidates for the job. Sultan Selim killed seven in one reign so that 'Mayest thou be Selim's vizier' came to mean 'Strike you dead!' in the vernacular. Viziers always carried their wills with them if summoned by the sultan. During Potemkin's coming war against the Turks, 60 per cent of the viziers were executed.

The sultan's death sentences, signified by a slight stamp of the foot in the throne room or the opening of a particular latticed window, were usually executed by the dreaded mutes, who could despatch with string or axe. The display of heads was part of the ritual of Ottoman death. The heads of top officials were placed on white marble pillars in the palace. Important heads were stuffed with cotton; middling heads with straw. More minor heads were displayed in niches while heaps of human giblets, noses and tongues, beautified the palace locale. Female victims, sometimes the gorgeous losers of the Harem, were sewn into sacks and tossed into the Bosphorus.²

The most direct threat to a sultan was the Janissaries of his own army, and the mob. Constantinople's people had always been a rule unto themselves, even under Justinian. Now the riffraff of Istanbul, manipulated by the Jan­issaries or the ulema, increasingly decreed policy. Potemkin's agent Pisani reported throughout the 1780s how viziers and others 'animated the canaille' to 'intimidate their Sovereign' by 'committing all sorts of excess.'³

Command was abysmal, discipline laughable and corruption endemic. The failure of command began at the top: in 1774, Abdul-Hamid I had succeeded the abler Mustafa III after being immured for forty-three years in the Cage. This gentle and frightened man was not equipped to be warlord or reformer, though he did rise to the occasion by fathering twenty-two children before his death.[32] He tippled wine and liked to say that, if he became an infidel, he would embrace Roman Catholic communion because the best wines grew in their countries: whoever heard of a Protestant wine? This plodding wit did not improve the discipline of his forces.

When Tott was forming a corps of artillery, he demanded an honest man to manage its funds. 'An honest man,' replied the Vizier. 'Where shall we find him? As for me I know none.' The Vizier turned at length to his Foreign Minister: 'And you? Can you name us an honest man?' 'Less than anybody,' laughed the Reis Effendi. 'I'm only acquainted with rogues.'⁴ The intellectual power of the Ottoman Government had also atrophied: the ignorance of Ottoman officials was a diplomatic joke. At the Congress of Sistova, one Turkish negotiator thought Spain was in Africa; the Reis Effendi, the Foreign Minister of an international empire, thought warships could not sail the Baltic; and all of them believed that Gibraltar was in England.⁵

The Empire could no longer depend on its military power. The Ottomans solved this problem by becoming a European power like any other. Indeed they turned Clausewitz's dictum on its head: while, for most powers, war was diplomacy by other means, diplomacy, for the Ottomans, was war by other means. The rise of Russia had changed Ottoman priorities. Russia's potential enemies - France, Prussia, Sweden and Poland - became the four potential allies of the Sublime Porte. The game was simple: each offered subsidies to the Porte to attack Russia. None of these powers would sit by while Russia consumed the Turks.

The Empire was, according to one of Potemkin's envoys, 'like an ageing beauty who could not realize her time was past'. But it still possessed vast military resources, in terms of men, and fanatical spirit, in its Islamic faith. Ruled by the bowstring, the green slipper and the canaille of Constantinople, the Empire in 1780 was more like a leprous giant whose Brobdingnagian limbs were still awesome even as they gradually fell off its colossal body.⁶

On 27 April 1779, Grand Duchess Maria Fyodorovna gave birth to a son, whom Catherine and Potemkin named Constantine and designated to become emperor of Constantinople after the destruction of the Sublime Porte. The

Grand Duchess had already produced an heir to the Russian Empire two years earlier - Catherine's first grandson, Grand Duke Alexander. Now she produced the Heir to the Byzantine Empire of the Greeks.

Using Classical history, Eastern Orthodoxy and his own romantic imagin­ation, Potemkin now created a cultural programme, a geopolitical system and a propaganda campaign all in one: the 'Greek Project' to conquer Constantinople and place Grand Duke Constantine on its throne. Catherine hired Constantine a Greek nurse named Helen and insisted that he should be taught Greek.⁷ Potemkin personally contributed to the Greek education of the Grand Dukes right through the 1780s, 'I should like to remind you', he wrote to the Empress about changing Alexander and Constantine's lessons, 'that in learning languages, the Greek one should be most capital as it is the basis of the others ... Where you mentioned reading the Gospel in Latin, the Greek language would be more appropriate as it was the language of the original.' Catherine wrote at the bottom: 'Change according to this.'⁸

We do not know exactly when the partners began to discuss Classical greatness and Byzantine restoration, but it was obviously at the very beginning of their relationship (when Catherine teased him as her 'giaour' - the Turkish name for an infidel). Catherine must have been impressed with the Project's odd mixture of imagination, history and practicality. Serenissimus was made for his Greek Project just as it was made for him. He was knowledgeable about the history and theology of Byzantine Orthodoxy. Catherine and Potemkin, like most educated people of their time, were brought up on the Classics, from Tacitus to Plutarch - hence Potemkin's nickname Alcibiades - though he read Greek and she did not. He often had his readers recite the Classical historians, and his libraries contained most of them. The Classical enthusiasts of the eighteenth century did not just read about ancient times: they wished to emulate them. They built like the Greeks and the Romans."" Now Potemkin was also making himself an expert on the Ottoman Empire.

The idea itself was not new: Muscovite propaganda had promoted Russia as the 'Third Rome' ever since the Fall of Constantinople, which Russians still called Tsargrad, city of Caesars. In 1472, the Grand Duke of Muscovy, Ivan III, married the last Emperor's niece, Zoe Palaelogina. His Metropolitan hailed him as the 'new Emperor of the new Constantinople - Moscow' and he used the title Tsar (Caesar), which Ivan the Terrible adopted. In the next century, Filofey, a monk, pointed out that 'two Romes have fallen, but the third stands and there will be no fourth'.⁹ But the neo-Classical splendour, the daring symmetry of religion, culture and politics, the practicality of the Austrian alliance, and the specific plan of a partition, belong to Potemkin. His talent was not merely the impulsive conception of ideas but also the patience and instinct to make them real: he had been following this Byzantine rainbow ever since coming to power and it had taken him six years to circumvent the pro-Russian Panin.

As early as 1775, when Catherine and Potemkin celebrated the Turkish peace in Moscow, the Prince had befriended the Greek monk Eugenios Voulgaris, who would supply the Orthodox theology for the Greek Project. On 9 September 1775, Catherine appointed Voulgaris, on Potemkin's sug­gestion, as the first archbishop of Kherson and Slaviansk. These cities did not yet exist. Kherson, named after the ancient Greek city of Khersonesos and the birthplace of Russian Orthodoxy, was merely a Greek name in the fevered imagination of Potemkin.

Catherine's decree appointing the Archbishop proclaimed the dubiously Greek origins of Russian Orthodoxy, a piece probably written by Potemkin. One of his first acts on becoming favourite was to found a Greek gymnasium. He now appointed Voulgaris to direct it. Potemkin tried to get his Greek Archbishop to be his 'Hesiod, Strabo Chrysostomos' and write a history of the region, 'dig up the hidden past...' and show the link between the Ancient Scythians and the Graeco-Slavs. Voulgaris never wrote the history, but he did translate Virgil's Georgics and dedicated the work to Potemkin, 'most high and eminent philhellenic prince', along with an ode to his new Athens on the Dnieper that ended: 'Here once again is to be seen the former Greece; Thou, famous Prince, be indeed victorious.'¹⁰ All this was just part of Potemkin's philhellenic programme to form a Greek civilization in a new Byzantine Empire around the Black Sea.

The genesis of the Greek Project is a window into the way the Empress and the Prince worked together. Catherine's rising secretary Alexander Bezborodko actually drafted the 'Note on Political Affairs' in 1780 that laid out the Project and it has been claimed that he conceived the idea. This is to misunderstand the relationship of the troika that henceforth made Russian foreign policy.

Potemkin conceived the Greek Project almost before Bezborodko arrived in Petersburg, as shown in his letters and conversation, his patronage of Voulgaris, the naming of Constantine and the foundation of Kherson in 1778. Bezborodko's 'Note' was a feasibility study of the idea, based on an explanation of Byzantine-Ottoman-Russian relations since the mid-tenth century, clearly commissioned by Catherine and Potemkin. Bezborodko's draft of the Austrian treaty of 1781 reveals how they worked: the secretary drafted on the right hand side of the page. Then Potemkin corrected it on the left in pencil, which he addressed to Catherine. From now on, Potemkin conceived the ideas and Bezborodko drafted them. Thus, on the Prince's death, Bezborodko was speaking the literal truth when he said that Potemkin was good at 'thinking up ideas when someone else had actually to do them'.¹¹

Bezborodko was an 'awkward, clownish and negligent' Ukrainian hobble­dehoy with thick lips and popping eyes who blundered about, his stockings about his heels, with the gait of an elephant. However, as Segur realized, he 'concealed the most delicate mind in the most oafish envelope'. He was said to relish regular orgies in the Petersburg brothel district. Indeed he often disappeared for thirty-six hours at a time. Italian opera-singers imported young Italian girls for his seraglio; he paid a soprano, Davia, 8,000 roubles a month which she repaid by cuckolding him with anyone she could find. 'Though richly dressed, he always appeared as if he had pulled on his clothes at the end of an orgy,' which he probably had.

Once he arrived home drunk to find an urgent summons from the Empress. At the Palace, Catherine demanded a document she had been promised. The factotum took out a piece of paper and read out the exquisitely drafted ukase. Catherine thanked him and asked him for the manuscript. He handed her the blank piece of paper and fell to his knees. Bezborodko had forgotten to write it, but she forgave him for his improvisation. He was an independent and outstandingly precise and sensitive intelligence who began as Potemkin's protege and became his political ally, even though he was friends with enemies like the Vorontsovs. The gratitude in his letters for Potemkin's patronage showed that the Prince was always by far the senior partner.¹² 'He keeps treating me very well,' he wrote to a friend, 'and ... I deserve it because very often I spend as much time on his private affairs as I do on European ones.'¹³

Serenissimus worked with Catherine's ministers, such as Procurator- General Viazemsky and President of the College of Commerce Alexander Vorontsov (Simon's brother). Potemkin, famed for his subtle political intrigues, disdained conventional Court politics: he regarded the ministers, particularly Vorontsov, 'with the greatest contempt' and he told Harris that 'even if he could get rid of them, he did not see anybody better to put in their places'.¹⁴ Bezborodko was the only one he seemed to respect. Potemkin proudly told Catherine that he never tried to build a party in Petersburg. He regarded himself as a royal consort, not a jobbing politician or a mere favourite. The only other member of his party was Catherine.

The first step towards the Greek Project was a detente with Austria. Both sides had been moving in this direction for some time and making encouraging diplomatic signals. The Holy Roman Emperor and co-ruler of the Habsburg Monarchy, Joseph II, never gave up on the Bavarian scheme that had led to the Potato War. He realized he needed Potemkin and Catherine to win Bavaria, which would make his Habsburg lands more compact and coherent. To this end, Joseph had to coax Russia away from Panin's cherished alliance with Prussia. If, in the process, he could increase his realm at the expense of the Ottoman Empire, so much the better. All roads led to Petersburg.

Joseph and his mother Maria Theresa had for years regarded Catherine as a nymphomaniacal regicide whom they called 'The Catherinized Princess of Zerbst'. Now Joseph weighed up a Russian alliance over his mother's oppos­ition. His instincts were backed by his Chancellor, Prince Wenzel von Kaunitz- Rietberg, who had engineered the Diplomatic Revolution of 1756 to ally

Austria with its old enemy France. Kaunitz was a vain, cold-hearted and libidinous neurotic who was so afraid of illness that he made Maria Theresa close her windows. His elaborate teeth-cleaning exercises at the end of each meal were the most disgusting feature of public life in Vienna. Kaunitz made sure that Austria's envoy in Petersburg, Cobenzl, took care 'to place relations with Monsieur de Potemkin on the footing of good friendship ... Tell me how you are getting on with him now.'¹⁵

On 22 January 1780, Joseph sent a message to Catherine, through her envoy in Vienna, Prince Dmitri Golitsyn, that he would like to meet her. The timing was ideal. She agreed on 4 February, informing only Potemkin, Bezborodko and a discontented Nikita Panin. It was set for 27 May in Mogilev in Belorussia.¹⁶

Empress and Prince keenly anticipated this meeting. Between February and April, they discussed it back and forth. The tension told on both of them. They calmed each other like a married couple and then exulted in their schemes like a pair of conspirators. Some time in April, Catherine's lover Lanskoy told her that the sensitive Potemkin's 'soul is full of anxieties'. Probably he was worrying about the array of intrigues against his southern plans, but she soothed him with her 'true friendship that you will always find in my heart ... and in the heart attached to mine, [that is, Lanskoy's], who loves and respects you as much as I do'. She ended tenderly: 'Our only sorrow concerns you, that you're anxious.' Potemkin snapped at poor little Lanskoy, who ran to Catherine. She was concerned that her favourite had irritated the Prince: 'Please let me know if Alexander Dmitrievich [Lanskoy] annoyed you somehow and if you are angry with him and why exactly.' There were even hints of the old days when they were lovers, though perhaps they were just discussing their plans: 'My dear friend, I've finished dinner and the door of the little staircase is open. If you want to talk to me, you may come.'

At the end of April, Serenissimus rode off to prepare the reception for the Tsarina and the Holy Roman Emperor - in Mogilev. It was his policy, and Catherine gave him the responsibility to set the scene. As soon as he departed, Catherine missed her consort. 'I'm without my friend, my Prince,' she wrote to him. Excited letters flew between them. On 9 May 1780, Catherine left Tsarskoe Selo with a suite that included the nieces Alexandra and Ekaterina Engelhardt, and Bezborodko. Nikita Panin was left behind. As the Emperor Joseph arrived in Mogilev to be greeted by Potemkin, Catherine was approaching on the road from Petersburg. She and her consort were still discussing the last-minute details of the meeting and missing each other. 'If you find a better way, please let me know,' she wrote about her schedule - then she signed off: 'Goodbye my friend, we are sick at heart without you. I'm dying to see you as soon as possible.'¹⁷

THE HOLY ROMAN EMPEROR

Is it not you who dared raise up The power of Russia, Catherine's spirit And with support of both desired To carry thunder to those rapids On which the ancient Rome did stand And trembled all the universe?

Gavrili Derzhavin, The Waterfall

On 21 May 1780, Prince Potemkin welcomed Emperor Joseph II, travelling under the incognito of Comte de Falkenstein, to Russia. It is hard to imagine two more different and ill-suited men. The uptight, self-regarding Austrian martinet wished to discuss politics immediately, while the Prince insisted on taking him off to the Orthodox Church. 'Just up to now, commonplaces have been all the conversation with Potemkin and he hasn't uttered a word of politics,' the Emperor, thirty-nine, balding, oval-faced and quite handsome for a Habsburg, grumbled to his disapproving mother, the Empress-Queen Maria Theresa. Joseph's impatience did not matter because Catherine was only a day away. The Emperor continued to chomp at the bit - but Potemkin displayed only an enigmatic affability: this was a deliberate political manoeuvre to let Joseph come to him. No one knew what Potemkin and Catherine were planning, but Frederick the Great and the Ottoman Sultan observed the meeting with foreboding, since it was aimed primarily at them.

The Prince handed the Emperor a letter from Catherine which plainly revealed her hopes: 'I swear at this moment there is nothing more difficult than to hide my sentiments of joy. The very name Monsieur le Comte de Falkenstein inspires such confidence .. .V Potemkin recounted his impressions of Joseph to Catherine, and the partners impatiently discussed their meaning. The Prince passed on Joseph's extravagant compliments about the Empress. The spirit of their unique partnership is captured in Catherine's letter when she was just a day away: 'Tomorrow I hope to be with you, everyone is missing you ... We'll try to figure out Falkfenstein] together.'²

This was easier said than done: the Emperor's awkward character baffled contemporaries - and historians. No one so represented the incongruities of the Enlightened despot: Joseph was an uncomfortable cross between an expansionist and militaristic autocrat and a philosophe who wished to liberate his people from the superstitions of the past. He thought he was a military genius and philosopher-king like his hero Frederick the Great (the enemy who had almost destroyed Joseph's own inheritance). Joseph's ideals were admirable, but he despised his fellow man, was tactless and lacked all con­ception that politics was the art of the possible. His over-strenuous doctrinaire reforms stemmed from an austere vanity that made him somewhat ridiculous: he believed that the state was his person.

Joseph's incognito was the symbol of his whole philosophy of monarchy. He was as pompous and self-righteous about his name as he was about his living arrangements and his reforms. 'You know that ... in all my travels I rigidly observe and jealously guard my rights and the advantages that the character of Comte de Falkenstein gives me,' Joseph instructed Cobenzl, 'so I will, as a result, be in uniform but without orders ... You will take care to arrange very small and ordinary quarters at Mogilev.'³

This self-declared 'first clerk of the state' wore a plain grey uniform, travelled with only one or two companions, wished to eat only simple inn food and liked to sleep on a military mattress in a roadside tavern rather than a palace. This was to create a challenge for the impresario of the visit, Potemkin, but he rose to it. Russia had few of the flea-bittern taverns the Emperor expected, so Potemkin dressed up manorhouses to look like inns.

The Emperor prided himself on perpetually inspecting everything from dawn till dusk. He never understood that inactivity can be masterful - hence the Prince de Ligne's comment that 'he governed too much and did not reign enough ...'. Ligne understood Joseph well - and adored him: 'As a man he has the greatest merit ... as a prince, he will have continual erections and never be satisfied. His reign will be a continual Priapism.' Since the death of his father in 1765, Joseph had reigned as Holy Roman Emperor or, as the Germans called it, Kaiser, but had to share power over the Habsburg Monarchy - which encompassed Austria, Hungary, Galicia, the Austrian Netherlands, Tuscany and parts of modern Yugoslavia - with his mother, the formidable, humane and astute Maria Theresa. For all her prudishness and rigid Catholic piety, she had laid the foundations for Joseph's reforms - but he imposed them so stringently that they first became a joke and then a disaster. He later took steps towards the emancipation of the serfs and the Jews, who no longer had to wear the Yellow Star of David, could worship freely, attend universities and engage in trade. He disdained his nobles; yet his reforms rained on his peoples like baton blows. He could not understand their obstinate ingratitude. When he banned coffins to save wood and time, he was baffled by the outrage that forced him to reverse his decision. 'God, he even wants to put their souls in uniform,' exclaimed Mirabeau. 'That's the summit of despotism.'

His emotional life was tragic: his talented first wife, Isabella of Parma, preferred her sister-in-law to her husband in what seemed to be a lesbian affair, but he loved her. When she died young after three years of marriage, Joseph, then twenty-two, was inconsolable. 'I have lost everything. My adored wife, the object of all my tenderness, my only friend is gone ... I hardly know if I am still alive.' Seven years later, his only child, a cherished daughter, died of pleurisy: 'One thing that I ask you to let me have is her white dimity dressing gown, embroidered with flowers ...'. Yet even these sad emotional outbursts were about himself rather than anyone else. He remarried a hideous Wittelsbach heiress, Josepha, to lay claim to her Bavaria, then treated her callously. 'Her figure is short, thickset and without a vestige of charm,' he wrote. 'Her face is covered in spots and pimples. Her teeth are horrible.'

His sex life afterwards alternated between princesses and prostitutes, and, if he thought he might fall in love with a woman, he drained himself of any desire by visiting a whore first. Ligne recalled that he had 'no idea of good cheer or amusements, neither did he read anything except official papers'. He regarded himself as a model of rational decency and all others with sarcastic disdain. As a man, he was a bloodless husk; as a ruler, 'the greatest enemy of this prince', wrote Catherine, 'was himself'. This was the Kaiser whom Potemkin needed to pull off the greatest achievements of his career.⁴

On 24 May 1780, the Empress of Russia entered Mogilev through the triumphal arch, escorted by squadrons of Cuirassiers - a sight that impressed even the sardonic Kaiser: 'It was beautiful - all the Polish nobility on horse­back, hussars, cuirassiers, lots of generals ... finally she herself in a carriage of two seats with Maid-of-Honour Miss Engelhardt...'. As cannons boomed and bells rang, the Empress, accompanied by Potemkin and Field-Marshal Rumiantsev-Zadunaisky, attended church and then drove to the Governor's residence. It was the beginning of four days of theatre, song and of course fireworks. No expense was spared to transform this drab provincial capital, gained from Poland only in 1772 and teeming with Poles and Jews, into a town fit for Caesars. The Italian architect Brigonzi had built a special theatre where his compatriot Bonafina sang for the guests.

Joseph put on his uniform and 'Prince Potemkin took me to court.'⁵ Serenissimus introduced the two Caesars, who liked each other at once, both dreaming no doubt of Hagia Sofia. They talked politics after dinner, alone except for Potemkin and his niece-mistress Alexandra Engelhardt. Catherine called Joseph 'very intelligent, he loves to talk and he talks very well'. Catherine talked too. She did not formally propose the Greek Project or partition of the Ottoman Empire, but both knew why they were there. She hinted at her Byzantine dreams, for Joseph told his mother that her 'project of establishing an empire in the east rolls around in her head and broods in her souP. The next day, they got on so well at an орёга comique that Joseph had confided plans that 'I don't dare publish' - as Catherine boasted to Grimm. They meant to impress each other. They had to like each other. They made very sure they did.⁶

There was still opposition to this realignment, not just from Panin and the Prussophile Grand Duke Paul. Rumiantsev-Zadunaisky inquired if these festivities augured an Austrian alliance - a query that was the prerogative of a prickly war hero. The Empress replied, 'it would be advantageous in a Turkish war and Prince Potemkin advised it'. Rumiantsev-Zadunaisky sourly recommended taking her own counsel instead. 'One mind is good,' replied Catherine laconically, 'but two, better.'⁷ That was the way they worked together.

Joseph, the obsessional inspector, rose early and inspected whatever he could find. Like many a talentless soldier - Peter III and Grand Duke Paul come to mind - he believed that enough inspections and parades would transform him into Frederick the Great. Potemkin politely escorted him to inspect the Russian army, but evidently found his strutting pace tiresome. When Joseph kept mentioning one of Potemkin's 'magnificent regiments', which he had not yet inspected, the Prince did not want to go because of 'bad weather that was expected at any moment'. Finally, Catherine told him like a nagging wife to take Joseph, whatever the weather.

A splendid tent was erected for the two monarchs to view the display of horsemanship while the other spectators, including the King of Poland's nephew Prince Stanislas Poniatowski, to whom we owe this story, watched on horseback. There was a distant roar as Prince Potemkin, at the head of several thousand horsemen, galloped into view. The Prince raised his sword to order the charge when suddenly the horse buckled under the weight of his bulk and collapsed, 'like a centaur on to its hindlegs'. However, he kept his seat during this embarrassing moment and gave his command. The regiment began its charge from a league away and, with the earth trembling, stopped right in front of the imperial tent, in perfect formation. 'I've never seen anything like this done before by a cavalry regiment,' said Joseph. His comments on Potemkin's mount were not recorded.⁸

On the 30th, Catherine and Joseph left Mogilev and headed in the same carriage to Smolensk, where they temporarily parted. Joseph, with only five attendants, headed off to see Moscow. Catherine was not far from Potemkin's birthplace, Chizhova. There is a legend that Potemkin invited Catherine to visit the village, where with his nephew, Vasily Engelhardt, one of her aides- de-camp and now owner of the village, he greeted her at the gates and showed her the wooden bathhouse where he was born. The well was henceforth named for Catherine. They then split up - the Prince joined Joseph on the road to Moscow, while the Empress returned to Petersburg. 'My good friend,' she wrote to Potemkin, 'it's empty without you.'⁹

Joseph could not understand Potemkin. 'Prince de Potemkin wants to go to Moscow to explain everything to me,' Joseph told his mother. 'His credit is at an all-time high. Her Majesty even named him at table as her true student ... He has not shown any particularly impressive views so far,' added Joseph, but 'I don't doubt he'll show himself on the journey.' But, once again, Joseph was confounded. While he ceaselessly gave pedantic perorations of his own views, in between brisk expeditions of inspection, Potemkin drifted away into silent reveries. The Prince wanted Joseph's alliance, but he was no sycophant and was not as impressed as he should have been to have the head of the House of Habsburg in his company. Once in Moscow, Joseph told 'very dear mother' that Potemkin 'explains to me the necessary' about some sights but 'to others I go alone'. It was entirely characteristic of Potemkin to doze in bed while the inspector-Emperor rose at dawn for more inspections. By the time they left, Joseph was indignant that Potemkin 'very much took his ease. I've only seen him three times in Moscow and he hasn't spoken to me about business at all.' This man, he concluded, is 'too indolent, too cool to put something into motion - and insouciant'.¹⁰

On 18 June Joseph and Potemkin arrived in Petersburg, where the two sides began to explore what sort of friendship they wanted. At Tsarskoe Selo, Potemkin arranged a treat for the Comte de Falkenstein. He recruited Catherine's English gardener from Hackney (originally from Hanover), the appropriately named Bush, to create a special tavern for the Emperor, who loved inns. When Baroness Dimsdale, the English wife of the doctor who inoculated the imperial family, visited a year later, the gardener proudly told her how he had a hung a sign outside the building on which he wrote 'The Count Falkenstein Arms'. He himself wore a placard reading 'Master of the Inn'. Joseph dined at the 'Falkenstein Arms' on boiled beef, soup, ham and the most 'agreeable yet common Russian dishes'. One wonders if the humourless pedant got the joke.¹¹

Throughout the fun, the Russian ministers and the diplomats were on edge as they sensed vast yet so far invisible changes. When the party returned to Petersburg, Joseph encountered Nikita Panin. 'This man', noticed the Kaiser, 'has the air of fearing that one address oneself to his antagonist Prince Potemkin.' By early July, the Prince himself was working between Emperor, Empress and the Austrian envoy, Cobenzl, on the beginning of a more formal relationship 'to re-establish the old confidence and intimacy between the two courts'. Catherine could see the Emperor's Janus-like personality, but, in the semi-public arena of her letters to Grimm, she declared his mind 'the most solid, most profound and most intelligent' she knew. By the time he left, the sides were closer, but nothing was decided. Maria Theresa still reigned in Vienna.¹¹

After Joseph's departure, in the midst of the bidding for Russian alliance from Austria, Prussia and Britain, Daria, Potemkin's estranged mother, died in Moscow. When the Empress heard, she was on her way to Tsarskoe Selo and the Prince was at his nearby summer residence, Ozerki. Catherine insisted on telling him herself, so she changed route and joined him. The loss of a distant parent is often more painful than that of a close one: Potemkin wept copiously because 'this prince', observed Corberon, 'combines the qualities and faults of sensitivity.¹³ There was an understatement.

Joseph's successful visit truly put the cat among the pigeons. The Prussian party, Panin and Grand Duke Paul, were in disarray. Frederick the Great decided to send a Prussian prince to Petersburg to counteract the Habsburg success. Well before the Mogilev meeting, his envoy Goertz had been dis­cussing such a visit with Potemkin and Panin. Instead of Prince Henry, who now knew Potemkin well, Frederick sent his nephew and heir, Frederick William. This was not a good idea. Joseph, for all his pedantry, was an impressive companion, but Frederick William, who had special instructions from the King to flatter Potemkin, was an oafish and stout Prussian boor without any redeeming social qualities. Prince Henry dutifully wrote to Potemkin asking him to welcome the uncouth nephew - in the tone of a man who reluctantly sends a cheap present but apologizes in advance for its disappointing quality. [33]

Potemkin and Panin welcomed the Prince of Prussia together on 26 August. However, Potemkin pointedly decreed that Alexandra Engelhardt would 'not give him a supper',¹⁴ and Catherine nicknamed the 'heavy, reserved and awkward' Prussian, 'Fat Gu'. The Hohenzollern was soon boring the entire capital except for the Grand Duke, who was so impressed with Frederick the Great and his military drill that any Prussian prince would do. Besides, Frederick's plan had already been undermined by the arrival of Joseph II's secret weapon - the Prince de Ligne.¹⁵

Corberon and Goertz convinced themselves, with wishful thinking, that nothing would come of Joseph's visit. However, the Frenchman then went to dinner with the Cobenzls 'and the new arrivals, the Prince de Ligne and his son'. Corberon dismissed this 'grand seigneur of Flanders' as an 'amiable гоиё\ but he was much more than that.

Charles-Joseph, Prince de Ligne, now fifty, was an eternally boyish, mis­chievous and effortlessly witty aristocrat of the Enlightenment. Heir to an imperial principality awarded in 1602, he was raised by a nurse who made him dance and sleep naked with her. He married a Liechtenstein heiress but found marriage 'absurd for several weeks and then indifferent'. After three weeks, he committed his first infidelity with a chambermaid. He led his Ligne regiment during the Seven Years War, distinguishing himself at the Battle of Kolin. 'I'd like to be a pretty girl until thirty, a general ... till sixty,' he told Frederick the Great after the war, 'and then a cardinal until eighty.' However, he was eaten by bitterness about one thing - he longed to be taken seriously as a general yet no one, from Joseph to Potemkin, would ever give him an independent military command. This rankled.¹⁶

Ligne's greatest talent was for friendship. The charmer of Europe treated every day as a comedy waiting to be turned into an epigram, every girl as an adventure waiting to be turned into a poem, and every monarch as a conquest waiting to be seduced by his jesting. His flattery could be positively emetic: 'What a low and brazen sycophant Ligne is!', wrote one who observed him in action. But it worked. Friends with both Joseph II and Frederick the Great, no mean feat in itself, as well as with Rousseau, Voltaire, Casanova and Queen Marie-Antoinette, he showed how small the monde was in those days. No one so personified the debauched cosmopolitanism of the late eighteenth century: T like to be a foreigner everywhere ... A Frenchman in Austria, an Austrian in France, both a Frenchman and an Austrian in Russia.'

Ligne's letters were copied, his bons mots repeated, across the salons of Europe - as they were meant to be. He was a superb writer whose bitchy portraits of the great men of his time, especially Potemkin, who fascinated him, were never bettered. His Melanges are, along with Casanova's Histoire, the best record of the era: Ligne was at the top and Casanova at the bottom of the same faro society. They met the same charlatans and dukes, prostitutes and countesses at balls and card tables, operas and bordellos, roadside taverns and royal courts, again and again, across Europe.

Ligne entranced Potemkin. Their friendship, bringing together two of the best conversationalists of the age, would wax and wane with the intensity of a love affair, chronicled in Ligne's many unpublished letters contained in Potemkin's archives, written in his tiny hand but dripping with wit and intelligence before sinking again into illegibility. This 'jockey diplomatique', as he called himself, was invited to all the Empress's private card games, carriage rides and dinners at Tsarskoe Selo. The bovine Prince of Prussia did not stand a chance against the man Catherine called 'the most pleasant and easy person to live with I've ever known, an original mind that thinks deeply and plays all sorts of tricks, like a child'.

Grand Duke Paul alone took trouble with Frederick William, which only served to alienate him from Catherine and Potemkin all the more. When the Empress gave a spectacle, ball and supper at the Hermitage Theatre in the Prince of Prussia's honour, the Grand Ducal couple accompanied the guest but Catherine sighed to Harris, 'I want you to defend me from boors,' and did not bother to attend the show. Diplomats wondered where the Empress had gone. It turned out she was playing billiards with Potemkin and Ligne.¹⁷

Empress and Serenissimus were relieved when Frederick William finally departed, having achieved nothing. He had noticed the cold shoulder: as king, he would take his revenge. But the Russians almost refused to let Ligne go. Ever the gentleman, the 'jockey diplomatique' stayed a little longer. Finally, in October, he insisted, so Potemkin went with him to show off one of his regiments and only let him leave with a deluge of presents - horses, serfs and a box encrusted with diamonds. Potemkin missed Ligne and kept asking Cobenzl when he was returning.

This was exactly what the Austrians wanted. They fired a barrage of compliments at Potemkin: in a little illustration of the lubricious nature of diplomatic flattery, Cobenzl asked his Emperor to mention Potemkin favourably in as many of his en clair despatches as possible. The Russian, he flattered Joseph in turn, rated a word from the Kaiser more highly than anything from the Kings of Prussia or Sweden. But the direct compliments of the Emperor should be saved for special occasions. And Joseph should also send regards to the Engelhardt nieces.¹⁸

On 17/28 November 1780, Joseph was liberated from the sensible restraints of Maria Theresa. Her death, after a reign of forty years, gave Joseph the chance almost to ruin the Habsburg legacy in a way that even Frederick of Prussia could not have imagined. In the lugubrious letters of sorrow that passed between Vienna and Petersburg, the grins were only just concealed behind the grief. 'The Emperor', Ligne joked to Potemkin on 25 November, only a week after her death, 'seemed to me so profoundly filled with friendship for you ... that I have had real pleasure to remonstrate with him on your account in all regards ... Have me told from time to time that you haven't forgotten me...'.¹⁹ There was no question of that.

When the Empress-Queen's body was laid in the Kaisergruft - imperial vault - of Vienna's Capucin Church, Joseph knew he could embark on his rapprochement with Russia. Potemkin declared both his 'keenness' and 'seriousness' to Cobenzl. Catherine made sure that all the details went directly to her and not to Panin, 'that old trickster', as she called him to Potemkin.²⁰ Catherine and Joseph turned their attention to the coming struggle against the Sultan.

Sir James Harris, who thought an Austrian alliance would help his own mission, still could not understand Russia's reluctance to ally with Britain, even after Potemkin's return from Mogilev. The Prince cheerfully blamed Catherine's refusal on a raft of flimsy excuses, including the 'imbecility of the tale-bearing favourite' Lanskoy, her weakness induced by her 'passions' and the 'adroit flattery' of the Habsburg Emperor, who made her think she was the 'greatest Princess in Europe'. This diatribe displayed Potemkin's genuine frustration with the effort of managing Catherine, but it also rings of Pot- emkinian mischief. This is a clear example of Potemkin 'playing' poor Harris, because the couple's secret letters prove they were both pinning their entire political system on an alliance with Austria.²¹ Harris at last realized the mistake of backing Potemkin against Panin, because the former was now uninterested, if friendly, while the latter was openly hostile.

Harris requested recall in the face of Panin's hostility. But London was still pressing him to find a way to win the Russian alliance. So in nocturnal conversations with Potemkin the ever resourceful Harris conceived an ambi­tious scheme. Potemkin's imagination was the source of what became official British policy. Britain, suggested the Prince, should offer Russia 'some object worthy of her ambition' to join the war. In cypher, Harris explained to his Secretary of State, Viscount Stormont, in November 1780: 'Prince Potemkin, though he did not directly say so, yet clearly gave me to understand that the only cession, which would induce the Empress to become our Ally, was that of Minorca.' This was not as far-fetched as it might sound because, in 1780, Potemkin was building his Black Sea Fleet and promoting trade through the Straits and out to Mediterranean ports such as Marseilles. Port Mahon in Minorca might be a useful base for the fleet. Russia had occupied Greek islands during the last war - but not kept any at the peace; Potemkin regularly offered Crete to France and England in his Ottoman partition plans; and Emperor Paul later occupied Malta. Besides he was careful, as Harris emphasized, never to suggest it directly. This was one of those fan­tastical empire-building games that Potemkin loved to play - at no cost to himself.

Potemkin was excited about the idea of a Russian naval base on Minorca, especially since Britain would leave large stores of supplies, worth £2,000,000, which would be at Russia's or Potemkin's disposal. He met Harris daily to discuss it and arranged the envoy's second tite-a-tite with Catherine on 19 December 1780. Before Harris was summoned, the Prince went down to see the Empress for two hours, returning with a 'countenance full of satisfaction and joy'. This was the climax of Harris's friendship with Serenissimus. 'We were sitting alone together very late in the evening when he broke out of a sudden into all the advantages that would arise to Russia ...'. We can hear Potemkin's child-like delight, chimerical dreams and febrile exhilaration, as he lazed on a divan in his rooms, strewn with bottles of Tokay and champagne, cards on green-baize tables: 'He then with the liveliness of his imagination ran on the idea of a Russian fleet stationed at Mahon, of peopling the island with Greeks, that such an acquisition would be a column of the Empress's glory in the middle of the sea.'"

The Empress saw the benefits of Minorca, but she told Potemkin, 'the bride is too beautiful, they are trying to trick me'. It seemed that she could not resist Potemkin's excitement when they were together but would often think better of it when he had gone. Russia, with an unbuilt fleet, could hold it only at Britain's pleasure. She turned down Minorca. She was right: it was too far away and Britain itself soon lost the island.

Potemkin grumbled that Catherine was 'suspicious, timid and narrow- minded', but again this was half play acting. Harris still could not resist hoping that the Prince was committed to England: 'Dined on Wednesday at Tsarskoe Selo with Prince Potemkin ... he talked upon the interests of our two Courts in such a friendly and judicious manner that I regret more than ever his frequent lapses into idleness and dissipation.' He still had not registered that Potemkin's strategic emphasis was not western at all but southerly. Nonetheless, as the Prince secretly negotiated with the Austrians, Sir James kept trying.

Joseph and Catherine had meanwhile agreed the terms of a defensive treaty, including the secret clause aimed at the Sublime Porte - but Potemkin's grand enterprise now hit a snag that was very much of its time. This was the so- called 'alternative', a diplomatic tradition by which monarchs signing a treaty put their name first on one copy and second on the other. The Holy Roman Emperor, as Europe's senior ruler, always signed first on both copies. Now Catherine refused to admit Russia was lower than Rome, while Joseph refused to lower the dignity of the Kaiser by signing second. So, amazingly, the realignment of the East ground to a halt over a matter of protocol.

This was one of those crises where the difference between Catherine and Potemkin was clearest, because, while the Empress was obstinate, the Prince begged her to be flexible and get the treaty signed. The bickering of the partners echoes through their letters and Cobenzl's despatches. Potemkin rushed back and forth between the two sides. Catherine at one point told him to inform Cobenzl 'to give up such nonsense which will imminently stop everything'. Everything did stop.

The tension was not helped by Potemkin's demands for favours for his nieces Alexandra and Ekaterina, both of whom were about to get married. Soon even Catherine's favourite Lanskoy was embroiled in the rows. But Catherine devised an inspired solution for Potemkin to suggest to Joseph: they would each exchange signed letters, setting out their obligation to each other, instead of a treaty.²³

The highly strung Prince, faced with this crisis in the scheme of a lifetime, collapsed with 'bad digestion'. Catherine visited Potemkin's apartments to make up and spent the evening with him 'from eight till midnight'. Peace was restored.

Just as the crisis over the Austrian treaty reached its climax, on 10 May 1781, Potemkin ordered Count Mark Voinovich, a Dalmatian sailor, to mount a small invasion of Persia. He was pursuing a secret Persian policy while he was trying to smooth the obstacles from the path of his Greek Project.

This scheme had run parallel to the Austrian negotiations for a full year. Ten days before Joseph II had suggested the Mogilev meeting with Catherine, on 11 January 1780, Serenissimus ordered General Alexander Suvorov, his ablest commander, to assemble an invasion force at Astrakhan. He ordered the ships he had been building at Kazan on the Volga since 1778 to move southwards. The alliance with Austria might take more years to accomplish. In the meantime, Russia would probe the Persian Empire instead of the Ottoman.

The Persian Empire in those days extended round the southern end of the Caspian to include Baku and Derbent, all of today's Azerbaijan, most of

Armenia and half of Georgia. The Armenians and Georgians were Orthodox Christians. As with the Greeks, the Wallachians and the Moldavians, Pot­emkin longed to liberate his fellow Orthodox and bring them into the Russian Empire. At the same time, he was meeting Armenian representatives in Petersburg, discussing the liberation of the Christians of Armenia from the Persian yoke.

The Prince was one of the few Russian statesmen who understood com­merce at that time: he knew that a trading post on the eastern Caspian was just 'thirty days' march from the Persian Gulf, just five weeks to get to India via Kandahar'. In other words, this was Potemkin's first and admittedly minor blow in what came to be called 'The Great Game'. We know that Potemkin was juggling his Greek Project with a Persian one because he talked about it with his British friends. The French and British watched Potemkin's secret Persian plans with interest. Indeed, six years later, the French Ambassador was still trying to discover its secrets.

In February 1780, Sasha Lanskoy had fallen ill and Potemkin delayed his final orders to Suvorov, who was left to kick his heels in drab provincial Astrakhan. Once the anti-Ottoman Greek Project, and Joseph's visit, was confirmed, it would have been foolish for Potemkin to spread his forces too thinly. So the plan was changed. Early in 1781, the Prince cancelled the invasion and instead persuaded Catherine to send a limited expedition, com­manded by the thirty-year-old Voinovich, 'a dangerous pirate' from Dalmatia to some, a 'sort of Italian spy of the ministers of Vienna' to others, who had fought for Catherine in the First Russo-Turkish War and temporarily captured Beirut, now the capital of Lebanon.

On 29 June 1781, this tiny naval expedition of three frigates and several transports sailed across the Caspian to found a trading post in Persia and lay the foundations of Catherine's Empire in Central Asia. Persia was in disarray, but the Satrap of the Askabad province across the Caspian, Aga-Mohommed- Khan, was playing many sides against the centre. This chilling and formidable empire-builder, who had been castrated as a boy by his father's enemies, hoped to become shah himself. He welcomed the idea of a Russian trading post on the eastern shores, perhaps to fund his own armies with Russian help.

Voinovich's expedition was an Enlightened mixture of Potemkin's scientific longing for knowledge, mercantile enthusiasm and purely imperial aggrand­izement. The meagre expedition boasted just fifty infantrymen, 600 men in all, and Potemkin's respected German-Jewish botanist Karl-Ludwig Hablitz, who probably wrote the unsigned account of the Prince's Persian expedition in the Quai d'Orsay archive. Voinovich was unsuited to such a sensitive role, but the expedition was in any case too small and was now left to its own devices. Probably this was the result of one of the many compromises between Catherine's caution and Potemkin's imagination. By the time the expedition set off, both Empress and Prince were firmly concentrating on Tsargrad and Vienna rather than Askabad and Kandahar.

Voinovich had been ordered to use 'only persuasion' by the Prince, but on arrival 'he did precisely the opposite'. When he arrived on the other side of the sea and found Aga-Mohommed camped with his army, Voinovich proved he was as 'bad a courtier as politician'. The Persian prince was still interested in a Russian trading post and even suggested that his nephew should lead a mission to Petersburg. Voinovich instead had the imprudence to establish a fort, with just twenty cannon, as if his 650 men could possibly defy a Persian army. While he gave fetes for the Persians and ostentatiously fired his cannons, he only managed to alarm the already suspicious locals, who heard that Suvorov was marching through Daghestan with 60,000 men. This piece of disinformation was probably the first British intrigue in the 'Great Game' and it worked. Aga-Mohommed decided to rid himself of these inept and obnoxious Russians.

The village chief invited Voinovich and Hablitz to dinner. They had scarcely arrived before the house was surrounded by 600 Persian warriors. Voinovich and Hablitz were given a choice of losing their heads or evacuating the fort and sailing away without delay. They were right to choose the latter since Aga-Mohommed was capable of unbridled savagery: he later blinded the entire male population - 20,000 men - of a town that resisted him. He also managed the rare feat of being the only eunuch in history to found a dynasty: the Qajars, descended from his nephew, ruled Persia until early this century, when they were replaced by the Pahlavis. It took another century before Russia conquered Central Asia.²⁴

The flotilla sailed miserably for home. Potemkin must take the blame for this quixotic expedition that could easily have ended in catastrophe, yet it was his Byzantine style to run an alternative policy just in case anything went wrong in Vienna.²⁵

It did not. Joseph agreed to sign the secret defensive treaty with the exchange of letters. For six months, Europe believed that the negotiations had collapsed but, secretly on 18 May, Catherine signed her letter to 'My dear Brother' - and Joseph reciprocated. She agreed that Russia would aid Austria against Prussia; but, more relevantly, for Potemkin, Joseph promised to defend Russia if it was attacked by the Turks - 'I am obliged three months after ... to declare war ...'. Austria therefore underwrote Russia's peace treaties with Turkey.²⁶ This realignment of Russian policy was Potemkin's personal triumph.

Catherine and Potemkin enjoyed fooling the international community. French, Prussian and British envoys tossed bribes around to learn what was happening. Harris suspiciously noticed that 'my friend' was in 'high spirits' but 'avoided every political subject'. Cobenzl, who knew everything of course, enjoyed himself too. 'The whole affair', he told his Emperor, 'is continuing to be a mystery here for everyone except Prince Potemkin and Bezborodko.'²⁷ It was not long before Joseph realized that Catherine usually got what she wanted. In spite of the priority of the Greek Project, she did not allow the Armed Neutrality to drop and persuaded both Prussia and Austria to sign. 'What Woman wants, God gives, goes the proverb,' mused Joseph, 'and once in their hands, one always goes further than one wants.' Catherine and Potemkin were exultant: Catherine was so excited by one flattering letter from Joseph that she actually blushed.

The treaty remained secret. It was 25 June, a month later, before Harris first suspected that a treaty had been signed, thanks to a bribe of £1,600 to Bezborodko's secretary, but amazingly the secret was kept for almost two years. Only Catherine, Potemkin and Bezborodko knew everything; Grand Duke Paul was not told. Panin withdrew to his Smolensk estates.¹⁸ The partners congratulated each other. Catherine saw herself and Potemkin as the mythical best friends of the Classical world - Pylades and Orestes. 'My old Pylades', she congratulated him, 'is a clever man.'

However, they now faced a challenge from Grand Duke Paul, who was profoundly sceptical about southern expansion and Austrian alliance. Aping his father, he remained a 'Prussian'. In July, when Catherine invited the British doctor Baron Dimsdale, with his wife, to inoculate the young Grand Dukes Alexander and Constantine against smallpox, Nikita Panin demanded the right to come back and supervise, a trick he had arranged with Paul. 'If he thinks ever to be reinstated in his post of First Minister,' Catherine snapped, 'he is greatly deceived. He'll never be anything in my Court other than a sick- nurse.'

Catherine and Potemkin must have discussed how to protect their policy from Paul and, if possible, convert him to the Austrian cause. Why not send him and his wife on a Grand Tour to Vienna and Paris, avoiding old Frederick the Great in Berlin? If Catherine suggested it, the nervous Paul would regard it as a trick by Potemkin to remove him. Serenissmus was arranging the creation of his own kingdom, founding his first cities on the Black Sea and planning his nieces' marriages. Paul could not be allowed to derail any of these schemes. Potemkin devised a solution/⁹

16

THREE MARRIAGES AND A CROWN

Or midst a lovely little orchard An arbour, where a fountain plays A sweet-voiced harp within my hearing My thoughts ensnares for divers pleasures, First wearies and then awakens my blood; Reclining on a velvet divan, A maiden's tender feelings coddling I fill her youthful heart with love.

Gavrili Derzhavin, 'Ode to Princess Felitsa'

Soon after the Austrian treaty was signed, Catherine put her consort's plan into practice. She persuaded Prince Repnin, Panin's nephew, to propose the Austrian trip to Paul, as if it came to from himself. Paul swallowed the bait and begged the Empress to let him go. After pretending to be reluctant, Catherine agreed - but she also worried about the inevitable blunders of her bitter, unstable son. 'I dare to implore the indulgence of Your Imperial Majesty', she asked Joseph, 'for the ... inexperience of youth.' Joseph sent the invitation. Paul and Maria Fyodorovna were excited. They were even polite to Potemkin, who in his turn praised the Heir to everyone.¹

Panin had heard about this plan. 'The old trickster' no longer cared to conceal his sourness. He hurried back to Petersburg and stirred up Paul's fears that the journey was a plot. Such trips could be dangerous for Russian princes: no one could forget that Peter the Great's son Alexei was brought back from Vienna and tortured to death. All this was real to a tsarevich whose father had been murdered by his mother and who could trust few. Panin suggested that Berlin would be a better idea than Vienna - and then hinted that Paul would not only be excluded from the succession and possibly murdered but that his children would be taken from him. Paul became hysterical.

At Tsarskoe Selo next morning, Sunday, 13 September, the Grand Duke and Duchess, both in a state of panic, refused to travel. They partly blamed the need to remain with the children after their inoculation. Catherine brought in Doctors Rogerson and Dimsdale to reassure them. The Court was in uproar for three days and the diplomats analysed how the Heir was undermining the Austrian rapprochement, defying the Empress and her Prince. Potemkin was so 'perplexed, irresolute and even despondent' that he even considered letting Paul visit the wily fox of Berlin. Harris, who was with him in his apartments that Friday and believed the Austrian alliance gave Britain renewed hope, warned him that such weakness could bring him down. Potemkin paced up and down the room, 'as in his manner', without saying anything, and then bounded off to see the Empress. Catherine was no Peter the Great, but the refusal of Paul to obey her orders would have caused a serious succession crisis. The partners resolved to force Paul to go. When Potemkin rejoined Harris an hour later, everything was settled.

The departure was a little tragedy of the life of royal families, played out in front of the Court, Paul's entourage, and scores of horses and serfs. On 19 September, the Heir, travelling incognito as Comte du Nord, and his wife kissed their children goodbye. The Grand Duchess fainted away and was actually carried unconscious to the carriage. The Grand Duke followed his wife with an expression of abject terror. The Empress and her big guns, Potemkin, Prince Orlov and the traitorous Count Panin, bid him goodbye. As he climbed grimly into the carriage, Paul whispered something to Panin, who did not answer.

The Heir pulled down the blinds and ordered the coachman to drive away fast. The next morning, Panin was dismissed.¹

Serenissimus, savouring his political victory, was arranging the marriages of both of his single mistress-nieces, Sashenka and Katinka. On 10 November 1781, Katinka 'the Venus' - Ekaterina Engelhardt, with whom half the Court, including at various times both Catherine's sons, Paul and Bobrinsky, were in love - married the sickly but rich Count Pavel Martynovich Skavronsky, in the Palace Chapel. Descended from the Livonian brother of Peter the Great's wife, Catherine I, Skavronsky was a sublime eccentric. Brought up in Italy, which he regarded as home, he suited Potemkin because he was a tolerant buffoon obsessed with music - a melomaniac who composed and gave concerts though he had no talent for music whatsoever. His servants were forbidden to talk and could only communicate in recitative. He gave all his orders in music and his visitors made conversation in the form of vocal improvisations. His singing dinner parties, ornamented by the sleepy coquet­tish Katinka, must have been zany.³ Catherine had misgivings about Ska- vronsky's ability to please a woman - 'he's a bit silly and clumsy', she thought, adding that she only cared because it was an issue that was 'close to us', meaning she regarded Potemkin's nieces as semi-family. The Prince disagreed - Skavronsky's weakness and wealth suited him.⁴

Two days later, Sashenka married her uncle's Polish ally, Grand Hetman (or Grand General) of the Polish Crown, Ksawery Branicki, aged forty-nine, a good-natured, self-made and ambitious ruffian who had made his career as King Stanislas-Augustus' hard man. He was what Casanova called a dim but swashbuckling 'Polish bravo'. Casanova duelled with Branicki in Warsaw for insulting his mistress, an Italian actress called La Binetti. Both were wounded - Branicki seriously - but became friends.⁵ When Segur passed through Warsaw, Branicki appeared in his room in traditional Polish costume - red boots, brown robe, fur hat and sabre - and said, 'Here are two companions for your journey,' giving him two bejewelled pistols.⁶

Branicki had fallen out with the King of Poland and, seeing his future as a Russian ally, found a kindred spirit in Serenissimus. They first met in Peters­burg in 1775 and Branicki had been currying favour ever since, working for Potemkin in Poland. On 27 March that year, he wrote to tell 'my dear General' that 'Poland has chosen me' to deliver the news that Potemkin had received the certificate of indigenat or Polish noble status, the first step in his long game to become either duke of Courland or king of Poland, his escape route should Catherine die.⁷ Branicki's marriage to his niece was obviously designed to be Potemkin's family bridgehead in Poland.⁸

The Empress supervised Alexandra's wedding to the 'Polish bravo'. The bride was taken to Catherine's rooms that morning and 'very richly dressed in some of the Empress's jewels, put on by her own hands'. We have a description of a similar wedding of one of the Empress's closest maids-of- honour, Lev Naryshkin's daughter: 'This lady's dress was an Italian night­gown of a white silver tissue with hanging sleeves ... and a very large hoop.' The bride dined with the Empress. In church, the bride stood on 'a piece of brocaded sea-green silk'. The couple held candles as crowns were held over their heads according to Orthodox tradition. They exchanged rings and the priest took a 'piece of silk 2 or 3 yards long and tied their hands together'. Once the wedding was over there was a feast, after which the bride returned the Empress's jewels and received 5,000 roubles.⁹

At almost the same time, the fourth sister, 'hopeless' Nadezhda who had married Colonel P.A. Ismailov less splendidly in 1779, lost her husband and then married an ally of Potemkin's, Senator P.A. Shepilev. The last niece, Tatiana, married her distant cousin Lieutenant-General Mikhail Sergeievich Potemkin, who was twenty-five years older than her, in 1785. Serenissimus nicknamed him 'Saint' for his good nature, and their marriage was happy until his early death.¹⁰

While Varvara and Alexandra ended their liaisons with Potemkin, Countess Ekaterina Skavronskaya, as we will now call her, seems to have remained his mistress. 'Things are on the same footing between her and her uncle as they were,' Cobenzl told Joseph II. 'The husband who is very jealous does not approve but does not have the courage to prevent it.' Even five years later, Skavronskaya was still 'more beautiful than ever and the favourite Sultana- in-chief of the uncle'.¹¹

Potemkin had Skavronsky appointed ambassador to Naples in 1784, which delighted him because it let him inhabit the land of maestros. But Ska- vronskaya was not interested in Italian opera, and Potemkin, while he ran several other mistresses, enjoyed his placid niece and did not wish to part from her. Finally she did go, but did not stay long. The husband sent notes to Serenissimus that are masterpieces of pitiful sycophancy: T cannot succeed in expressing all the joy and gratitude with which I read what you have deigned to write to me and how much I have been moved to see that you deign to grant me your kindness and memory which I have consecrated my life to deserve and on which I dare suggest that no one in the world could place a higher value.' More than that, Skavronsky desperately wrote to beg Potemkin to help him avoid diplomatic faux pas. The Prince must have chuckled as he read these letters, though he liked the sculptures Skavronsky sent him from Italy.¹² Remarkably the Count fathered a family in between arias in Naples, including a daughter who was one day to be notorious in Europe.

Skavronsky always took care to tell the Prince that his wife longed to rejoin him in Russia, which was probably true, because the dreamy 'angel' missed her Motherland. While she was in Naples, she kept a 'woman slave' under her bed who helped her get to sleep by 'telling her the same story every night'. By day she was 'perpetually idle', her conversation was 'as vacuous as you could imagine', but she could not help but flirt.¹³ She became Naples's leading coquette, high praise in a city that was soon to experience the wiles of Emma, Lady Hamilton. But when Potemkin's successes gave him the chance to woo Europe, Katinka hurried back to share his limelight.

Countess Alexandra Branicka remained not just Potemkin's confidante and his Polish agent of influence, but Catherine's closest friend. While her spendthrift husband did his best to lose their fortune, she increased it prodigiously, which led to arguments with her uncle - but they were always reconciled.¹⁴ For the rest of her life she was often with Potemkin and the Empress - though she lived on her Polish and Belorussian estates. Her almost illegible letters to him are very affectionate: 'My father, my life, I feel so sad to be so faraway ... I ask you one mercy - don't forget me, love me for ever, nobody loves you like me. My God, I'll be happy when I've seen you.'¹⁵ She was widely respected. Contemporaries emphasized her good morals, 'remaining a model of faith­fulness all her life',¹⁶ something remarkable in those days, especially when she was married to an older Lothario. They had a large family. Perhaps she fell in love with Branicki's endearing roughness.

This troika of marriages sparked rows with the Empress about the medals and money bestowed on his family - '600,000 roubles, money, the Order of St Catherine for the future Grande Generale [Alexandra] and the portrait [of the Empress] for the Princess Golitsyn [Varvara]'. Potemkin expected his nieces to be endowed by the state - were they not Catherine's extended family? He got his way after weeks of rows. He certainly believed in caring for his own.

Paul left Tsarskoe Selo harbouring a visceral hatred for Serenissimus. Yet, like a monarch more than a minister, Potemkin tried to preserve a balance among the Court factions and foreign powers. In November, he talked to Harris about restoring Panin to a degree of power, presumably to balance him against the rising Bezborodko.¹⁷ One of his best features - and one lacking in many politicians, even democratic ones - was the absence of vindictiveness. Perhaps he simply did not want to see Panin humiliated any more. In any case, Potemkin's triumph had broken Panin: he fell ill in October.

Similarly, by early 1782, the confused Cobenzl was telling Joseph that Potemkin was leaning back towards Prussia. Both Cobenzl and Harris con­cluded their reports by confessing that they were unable to fathom the motives for Potemkin's manoeuvres, but the Prince, while favouring Austria, continued to steer a middle passage between these two German monarchies for the rest of his life.¹⁸

In Vienna, Paul appalled his hosts, particularly after Joseph confided the secret of the Austrian alliance. The Habsburg saw that the 'feebleness and pusillanimity of the Grand Duke joined to falseness' were unlikely to make this angry snub-nosed paranoid into a successful autocrat. Paul spent six weeks in Austria, where he lectured Joseph about his loathing for Potemkin. When he arrived in the Habsburg lands in Italy, he ranted to Leopold, Grand Duke of Tuscany, Joseph's brother, about his mother's Court and denounced the Greek Project and the Austrian alliance. Catherine's plans 'for aggrand­izing herself at the expense of the Turks and refounding the empire of Constantinople' were 'useless'. Austria had obviously bribed that traitor Potemkin. When he came to the throne, Paul would arrest him and clap him in prison!¹⁹ The Habsburg brothers were surely relieved when the Comte du Nord departed for Paris.

The Prince could insure himself against Paul only by changing the succession or by establishing a base outside Russia. He therefore pursued a different plan to discredit Paul once and for all - and possibly later remove him from the succession, leaving the throne to his son Alexander. When Potemkin heard that Paul's suite included Prince Alexander Kurakin, another Prussophile enemy and Panin's nephew, he asked the Austrians, via Cobenzl, to let him see the Cabinet Noir intercepts of Paul's post. The Austrian secret services passed on to Potemkin what they gleaned from Paul's contacts with Panin. The Prince was sure that he would catch Kurakin spying for the Prussians and therefore taint Tsarevich Paul.²⁰

Nikita Panin, ill as he was, knew that Kurakin's post would be opened, so he arranged for Paul to keep in contact with his supporters at home via a third party, Pavel Bibikov, son of the general. The letter that was opened in early 1782 from Bibikov to Kurakin was a bombshell that, more than the

Saldern Plot, ensured Paul's exclusion from power for the rest of Catherine's life. Bibikov described Catherine's rule as 'the horrible situation in the Mother­land' and criticized Potemkin, 'Cyclops par excellence' and 'le borgne', for ruining the army. 'If he breaks his neck', everything would return to its 'natural order'.

Catherine was alarmed and angry. Bibikov was immediately arrested. Cath­erine personally wrote out the questions for his interrogation by Sheshkovsky. Bibikov's excuse was that he was just unhappy at his regiment being stationed in the south. Catherine sent the results to the Prince, while ordering Bibikov tried in the Senate's Secret Expedition. The trial in camera found him guilty of treason and, under military law, of defaming his commander, Potemkin, and sentenced him to death.

The Prince's decency came into play. Even though Paul's circle had actually discussed breaking his neck, Potemkin asked Catherine for mercy on 15 April 1782: 'Even if virtue produces jealousy, it's nothing still compared to all the good it grants to those who serve it ... You have probably pardoned him already ... He'll probably overcome his dissolute inclinations and become a worthy subject of Your Majesty and I will add this grace to your other favours to me.' Admitting he was terrified of Potemkin's vengeance, Bibikov wept under interrogation. He offered to apologize publicly.

'He shouldn't be afraid of my vengeance,' Potemkin wrote to Catherine, 'in so far as, among the abilities granted to me by God, that inclination is missing. I don't even want the triumph of a public apology ... He'll never find any example of my vengeance, to anybody, in my entire life.'²¹ This was true - but, more than that, it displayed the statesman's measured moderation: he never pushed things too far and therefore never provoked an unwanted reaction.

Bibikov and Kurakin, recalled from Paul's suite in Paris, were exiled to the south. When the Heir returned to Petersburg at the end of the journey, his influence was broken, his allies scattered. Even his mother disdained her tiresome, unbalanced son and his wife as 'Die schwere Bagage' - the heavy luggage.²² 'Prince Potemkin is happier', Cobenzl told Joseph, 'than I've ever seen him.'²³

The secret Austrian treaty was soon tested - in the Crimea, the key to the Black Sea, the last Tartar stronghold and the nub of Potemkin's policy of southern expansionism. In May, the Prince headed beyond to Moscow 'for a short trip', visiting some estates. While he was on the road, the Turks again backed a Crimean rebellion against Catherine's puppet Khan, Shagin Giray, who was driven out once more, along with the Russian resident. The Khanate dissolved into anarchy.

The Empress sent a courier after the Prince. 'My dear friend, come back as soon as possible,' she wrote on 3 June 1782, adding wearily that they would have to honour their promise to reinstate the Khan - even though it was the third time they had done so. She told Potemkin the news that the British Admiral Rodney had defeated Admiral Joseph de Grasse's French fleet at the Battle of the Saints in the Caribbean on 1/12 April, which slightly alleviated Britain's plight as America won its freedom. In the Crimea, she realized that her policy of propping up Shagin Giray was obsolete but the delicate question of what to do depended on the Powers of Europe - and Potemkin. 'We could decide it all in half an hour together,' she told her consort, 'but now I don't know where to find you. I ask you to hurry with your arrival because nothing scares me more than to miss something or be wrong.' Never was their partnership, and his equality, more clearly stated.²⁴

The Prince saw the Crimean tumult as a historic opportunity, because Britain and France remained distracted by war. He galloped back and almost bounded into town. He immediately sent this playfully Puckish letter to Sir James Harris in French, scrawled in his scratchy hand: 'Vive la Grande Bretagne et Rodney; je viens d'arriver, mon cher Harris; devinez qui vous ecrit and venez me voir tout de suite.'[34]

Harris rushed through Tsarskoe Selo at midnight to visit 'this extraordinary man who', he told the new Foreign Secretary, his close friend Charles James Fox, 'every day affords me new matter of amazement'. Sir James found Potemkin in a state of almost febrile ebullience. Serenissimus insisted on talking throughout the night, even though he had just finished 'a journey of 3000 versts, which he had performed in 16 days, during which period he had slept only three times and, besides visiting several estates and every church he came near, he had been exposed to all the delays and tedious ceremonies of the military and civil honours which the Empress had ordered should be bestowed on him ... yet he does not bear the smallest appearance of fatigue ... and on our separation, I was certainly the more exhausted of the two'.²⁵ The reunited Prince and Empress resolved to reinstate Shagin Giray as Crimean khan but also to invoke the Austrian treaty in case it led to war with the Sublime Porte. Joseph replied so enthusiastically to 'my Empress, my friend, my ally, my heroine',²⁶ that, while Potemkin organized the Russian military response to the Crimean crisis, Catherine took the opportunity to turn their Greek Project from a chimera into a policy. On 10 September 1782, Catherine proposed the Project to Joseph, who was shocked by its impracticality yet impressed by its vision. First, Catherine wanted to re­establish 'the ancient Greek monarchy on the ruins ... of the barbarian government that rules there now' for 'the younger of my grandsons, Grand Duke Constantine'. Then she wanted to create the Kingdom of Dacia, the Roman province that covered today's Rumania, 'a state independent of the three monarchies ... under a Sovereign of Christian religion ... and a person of loyalty on which the two Imperial Courts can rely ...'. Cobenzl's letters make clear Dacia was specifically understood to be Potemkin's kingdom.

Joseph's reply was equally sweeping: he agreed to the Project in principle. In return he wanted the fortress of Khotin, part of Wallachia, and Belgrade. Venice would cede Istria and Dalmatia to him and get Morea, Cyprus and Crete in return. All this, he added, was impossible without French help - could France have Egypt? Only war and negotiation could decide the details - but he did not reject it.²⁷

Did Potemkin really believe that there would be a reborn Byzantine Empire ruled by Constantine, with himself as king of Dacia? The idea thrilled him, but he was always the master of the possible. The Dacian idea was realized in the creation of Rumania in the mid-nineteenth century, and Potemkin certainly planned to make that real. But he did not lose his head about it.²⁸ During 1785 he discussed the Turks with the French Ambassador Segur and claimed that he could take Istanbul, but insisted that the new Byzantium was just a 'chimera'. It was all 'nonsense', he said. 'It's nothing.' But then he mischievously suggested that three or four Powers could drive the Turks into Asia and deliver Egypt, the Archipelago, Greece, all Europe from the Ottoman yoke. Many years later Potemkin asked his reader, who was declaiming Plutarch, if he could go to Constantinople. The reader tactfully replied it was quite possible. 'That is enough,' exclaimed Potemkin, 'if anyone should tell me I could not go thither, I would shoot myself in the head.'²⁹ He was always flexible - it was he who suggested in September 1788 that Constantine could be made king of Sweden, a long way from Tsargrad.³⁰ So he wished it to serve its strategic purpose and to be as real as he could make it.

Catherine the Great herself settles any argument about Potemkin's con­tribution to the Austrian alliance and the Greek Project. 'The system with Vienna's court', she wrote later, 'is your achievement.'³¹

On 7 August 1782, the Empress and Serenissimus attended the unveiling of Falconet's mammoth statue of Peter the Great - the Bronze Horseman - that still stands in Senate Square in Petersburg. It was a statement in stone of their ambitions to emulate the achievements of Peter, who had succeeded so brilliantly in the Baltic but failed in the south.

The ^prince ordered his nephew, Major-General Samoilov, to begin pre­paratory action to restore order in the Crimea, but he decided to go south himself and conduct the main part. This trip marks the end of the domestic era of Potemkin and Catherine's partnership and the beginning of his time of colossal achievement. From now on, Catherine understood that they were to be apart as much as they were together. This was his path to greatness and contentment, although, as she sweetly admitted to him while he was far away, 'My dear master, I dislike it so much when you are not here by my side.' On 1 September 1782, the Prince left St Petersburg to subdue the Crimea.³²

POTEMKIN'S PARADISE: THE CRIMEA

I now steal captives from the Persians Or at the Turks direct my arrows

Gavrili Derzhavin, 'Ode to Princess Felitsa'

The Crimea was what Potemkin called 'the wart' on the end of Catherine's nose - but it was to become his own Russian 'paradise'. The peninsula itself was not only dazzlingly and lushly beautiful but it was also a cosmopolitan gem, an ancient entrepot that controlled the Black Sea. The Ancient Greeks, Goths, Huns, Byzantines, Khazars, Karaim Jews, Georgians, Armenians, Genoese and Tartars, who came later, were all just visitors there, trading and dealing, in a peninsula that seemed to belong to no one race. For a Classicist like the Prince, there were the ruins of Khersoneses and the' mythical temple of Iphigenia, the daughter of Agamemnon. But he was most interested in the Crimea's strategic importance and its history as the Mongol stronghold that had terrorized Russia for three centuries.

The Tartar Khanate of the Crimea, known in the West as Crim Tartary, was a state that seemed archaic even in 1782 - the last Mongol outpost. Crimea's Giray dynasty were the second family of the Ottoman Empire because they were descended from Genghis Khan himself, which was much more distinguished a descent than the House of Othman. If Rome and Byzantium represented two of the three international traditions of imperial legitimacy, the blood of Genghis Khan was the third. The family owned estates in Anatolia, where the Ottomans conveniently imprisoned restless potential successors in a sort of Giray Cage. If ever the Ottomans became extinct, it was understood that the Genghizid Girays would succeed them. They were always more allies than subjects.

The Khanate had been founded in 1441 when Haci Giray broke away from the Golden Horde and made himself khan of the Crimea and the shores of the Black Sea. His successor Mengli Giray acknowledged the ultimate suzer­ainty of the Ottoman Emperor, and from then on the two states existed in a tense, respectful alliance. The Tartars guarded the Black Sea, defended Tur­key's northern borders and provided a stream of blonde Slavic slaves to sell to the fleshpots and rowing-galleys of Constantinople. Between 1601 and 165 5, it has been estimated, they kidnapped over 150,000 slaves. Their armies of 50,000-100,000 horsemen had the run of the eastern steppes, raiding into Muscovy whenever they needed more slaves to fill their markets. They bore six-foot-long square-shaped bows, with arrows two feet long; muskets and round, bejewelled shields, with pistols studded with lapis and emerald. Until that century, the Genghizid khans received tribute from the tsars of Russia and kings of Poland. The Girays believed their grandeur was second to none. 'His imperial star rose above the glorious horizon,' one khan wrote in an inscription in the Bakhchisaray Palace, where the Khans resided in their Seraglio like miniature Great Turks, guarded by 2,100 Sekbans, Janissaries from Constantinople. 'His beautiful Crimean throne gave brilliant illu­mination to the whole world.'

For 300 years, Tartary had been one of the most important states of eastern Europe, its cavalry supposedly the best in Europe. It was far larger than just the Crimea: at its apogee in the sixteenth century, it had ruled from Tran­sylvania and Poland to Astrakhan and Kazan, and halfway to Moscow. Even in Potemkin's day, the Khanate ruled from the Kuban steppes in the east to Bessarabia in the west, from the tip of the Crimea to the Zaporogian Sech - 'all that territory that separates the Russian Empire from the Black Sea'. Often allied with Lithuania against Muscovy, in the sixteenth century Tartar khans had even burned the suburbs of Moscow.¹ But their state was fatally flawed. The khans were not hereditary but elective. Beneath the Girays were the murzas, Tartar dynasties, also descended from the Mongols, who elected one Giray as khan and another, not necessarily his son, as his heir-apparent, the Kalgai khan. Furthermore many of the khan's subjects were unbiddable Nogai Tartar nomads. It was only in times of war that the khan could really command.²

Baron de Tott, French adviser to the Ottomans, was seconded to the Crimea, where he rode, hawked and went greyhound coursing with the Khan, who was always accompanied by 6,000 horsemen. When the Sublime Porte declared war on Russia in 1768, Khan Kirim Giray, accompanied by Tott, galloped out of the Crimea at the head of an army of 100,000 to attack the Russian army on the Bessarabian-Polish border, where young Potemkin served. When Kirim Giray died (possibly of poisoning), the Tartars halted in Bessarabia to install the new Khan Devlet Giray, and the Baron was one of the last to witness the primitive magnificence of this Genghizid monarchy: 'Dressed in a cap loaded with two aigrettes enriched with diamonds, his bow and quiver flung across his body, preceded by his guards and several led horses whose heads were ornamented with plumes of feathers, followed by the standard of the Prophet and accompanied by all his Court, he repaired to his Palace where in the hall of the Divan, seated on his throne, he received the homage of all the grandees.' This noble scene of nomadic warriorship was incongruously accompanied by 'a numerous orchestra and a troop of actors and buffoons'. When he set off to war, the Khan resided in a tent like his Mongol forefathers 'decorated on the inside with crimson'.³

The initial raids were impressive but the Russo-Turkish War was a disaster for Crim Tartary. Devlet Giray also perished in his crimson-lined tent and was replaced with a lesser man. Tott was recalled to Constantinople, but unfortunately the Tartar army remained on the Danube with the main Ottoman armies, so that it was not there in 1771 when Vasily Dolgoruky occupied the Crimea. As we saw, Pugachev and the diplomatic conjuncture prevented the Russians keeping all their conquests in 1774. But Catherine, shrewdly advised by Potemkin, insisted in the Treaty of Kuchuk-Kainardzhi that Tartary be made independent of the Sultan, who would still keep nominal religious control as caliph. This 'independence' brought further ruin.

Crimea's tragedy had a face and a name. Shagin Giray, the Kalgai Khan or, as Catherine put it, Tartar 'Dauphin', had led the Crimean delegation to St Petersburg in 1771. 'A sweet character,' she told Voltaire, 'he writes Arabic poems ... he's going to come to my circle on Sundays after dinner when he is allowed to enter to watch the girls dance ...'. Shagin was not only handsome but had been educated in Venice. Thus he became the Russian candidate for khan when the Crimeans agreed to their independence from Istanbul in the Treaty of Karasubazaar in November 1772. That year, Shagin left the capital with 20,000 roubles and a gold sword.⁴ However, the Ottomans never accepted the independence of the Crimea, despite agreeing to it in both the Treaties of Kuchuk-Kainardzhi and Ainalikawak. They handed over Kinburn on the Dnieper and two of their forts on the Sea of Azov. But they kept the powerful fortress of Ochakov from which to threaten the Russians, who occupied the land between the Dnieper and the Bug.

In April 1777, Shagin Giray managed to get himself elected khan. He had been far too impressed with the Russian Court. His veneer of Western culture did not long conceal his political ineptitude, military incompetence and unrestrained sadism. Like an Islamic Joseph II but without his philanthropy, Shagin set about creating an enlightened despotism, backed by a mercenary army led by a Polish nobleman. Meanwhile the Russians had settled 1,200 of their Greek allies from the war in their town of Yenikale on the Sea of Azov: these 'Albanians', as they were called, soon argued with the Tartars. When the Ottomans sent a fleet with another ex-khan on board to replace Shagin, the Tartars rebelled and Shagin fled again. In February 1778, Potemkin ordered yet another operation, while the Ottomans comically declared that they could prove Shagin was an infidel because he 'sleeps on a bed, sits on a chair and does not pray according to the correct manner'.⁵ The restored Khan, so deluded about his political abilities that according to Potemkin he thought he was a Crimean Peter the Great, murdered his enemies so savagely that he appalled even the Russians. Catherine hoped the Khan had learned his lesson.

Potemkin however worked to pull the rug from under the Khanate. Its economy depended on Greek, Georgian and Armenian traders and fruit­growers - all Orthodox. The Tartars, whipped up by their mullahs, baited by the 'Albanians' and provoked by Shagin's Polish myrmidons, turned against these Christians. In 1779, Russia sponsored the exodus of the 31,098 Chris­tians, under the control of General Alexander Suvorov. The Christians were presumably happy to leave a chaotic Moslem quagmire to find refuge in an Orthodox empire. They were promised economic privileges in Russia. But the exodus sounds like a death march. Their homes were not ready and many died on the road. Potemkin and Rumiantsev-Zadunaisky, the senior political and military officials, must share responsibility for their misery. But Potemkin did settle the majority in Taganrog and his new town of Mariupol. In imperialistic terms, it worked splendidly: without either trade or agriculture, Shagin found himself impoverished except for Russian generosity. Shagin's brothers rebelled in the summer of 1782. When he fled again, begging for Russian aid, one of them, Bahadir Giray, was elected khan. His reign was to be short.

It took Potemkin, who now assumed complete command of the southern theatre, just sixteen days to make it across Eurasia from the Baltic to the Black Sea. He travelled at the galloping pace usually reserved for couriers - but he made it his own. He grumbled to Catherine about 'displeasing com­panions, bad weather, poor roads and slow horses'.⁶ The displeasing com­panion was probably Major Semple. Potemkin quizzed him on the armies of Western Europe, and the rascal claimed to have advised him on Russian military reforms, though Potemkin's ideas predated Semple's arrival and he executed them after his departure. The Prince was losing patience with the conman. Potemkin and Catherine exchanged warm letters all the way. She wanted to hear about the Crimea but gave him the latest news about Katinka Skavronskaya, who was ill. Lanskoy visited her and then reported to Cath­erine and Potemkin that she was getting better - this was how their peculiar family worked.⁷

On 16 September 1782, Serenissimus entered his new city of Kherson. On the 22nd, he met Shagin Giray at Petrovsk (now Berdyansk) to negotiate Russian intervention. He then ordered General de Balmain to invade the Crimea. The Russians routed the rebels, killing 400 'rather wantonly' before taking the capital Bakhchisaray. Shagin Giray, guarded by Russian soldiers, took possession of his capital again. On 30 September, Potemkin's nameday, which he usually celebrated with Catherine in his apartments, she sent him some wifely presents - a travelling tea-set and a dressing case: 'What a wild place you've gone to for your nameday, my friend.'⁸

A measure of tranquillity was restored by mid-October and Potemkin returned to his new town, Kherson. For the rest of his life, he spent much of his time in the south. Catherine missed him deeply but 'my master, I have to admit that your four-week stay in Kherson has been immensely useful'.⁹ He worked hard to accelerate Kherson's constructions and shipbuilding, and inspected the building of the Kinburn fortress opposite Ochakov, the Ottoman stronghold. 'How can this small town raise its nose against the young Colossus of Kherson?', asked Catherine as the partners waited to see if the Sublime Porte would go to war against her. Luckily the united front of Austria and Russia proved sufficient to intimidate the Porte.¹⁰ The Colossus rushed back to Petersburg to persuade Catherine to annex the Khanate.¹¹

It was a different Prince who returned to Petersburg in late October. He had a mission - and everyone noticed 'the character and conduct of Prince Potemkin are so materially changed within these six months,' Harris reported to Lord Grantham, the new Foreign Secretary. 'He rises early, attends to business, is become not only visible but affable to everybody'.¹²

Serenissimus even dismissed his basse-cour. Major Semple tried to use Potemkin's protection to squeeze the merchants of Petersburg and extort money from the Duchess of Kingston. When he threatened to send Russian soldiers to her house to get the money, Potemkin exposed the 'Prince of Swindlers,' who fled Russia, defrauding merchants all the way home. Little is known about Semple's subsequent adventures, but Ligne later wrote to Potemkin that he had entertained 'one of Your Highness's Englishmen, le Major Semple, who told me he accompanied you to the conquest of the Crimea'. He was convicted of fraud in England, transported in 1795, escaped, then died in prison in London in 1799.¹³ Serenissimus enjoyed his menagerie of mountebanks, learning all he could from them and storing it in his prodigious memory. They used him. But Potemkin always got the better deal.

Now he started to sell his houses, horses, estates, jewels, amassed 'loads of ready money', and declared that he wished to retire to Italy. He told Harris he had lost his power and that he had offered Catherine his resignation but she had rejected it. Potemkin was forever threatening resignation - Catherine must have been used to it. Nonetheless, no one was quite sure what was afoot.¹⁴ He even paid his debts.

It seemed as if God was paying Potemkin's debts too. Prince Orlov had gone mad after the death of his new young wife in June 1781 and wandered ranting, through the corridors of palaces. Nikita Panin had a stroke on 31 March 1783. When these two eclipsed suns, who loathed one another, yet grudgingly admired Potemkin, died within a few days, Catherine thought they would be 'astonished to meet again in the other world'.¹⁵

The Prince was organizing his affairs because he was preparing himself for his life's work in the south. He was in his creative prime when Catherine's 'dear master' got back to Petersburg - ideas whirled out of him as forcefully and picturesquely as sparks from a Catherine wheel. He immediately set to work on her to settle the Crimean problem once and for all. Was Catherine the tough, obstinate strategist and Potemkin the cautious tactician, as historians would claim later? In this case, Potemkin took the tougher line and got his way - but in different cases they took different lines: it is impossible to generalize. When faced with a problem or a risk, the pair argued, shouted, sulked, were reconciled, back and forth, until their joint policy emerged fully formed.

In late November, the Prince explained to Catherine, in a passionate tour de force, why the Crimea, which 'breaks our border', had to be taken because the Ottomans 'could reach our heart' through it. This had to be done now while there was still time, while the British were still at war with the French and Americans, while Austria was still enthusiastic, while Istanbul was still wracked with riots and plague. In a stream of imperialistic rhetoric and erudite history, he exclaimed:

Imagine the Crimea is Yours and the wart on your nose is no more! ... Gracious Lady ... You are obliged to raise Russian glory! See who has gained what: France took Corsica, the Austrians without a war took more in Moldavia than we did. There is no power in Europe that has not participated in the carving-up of Asia, Africa, America. Believe me, that doing this will win you immortal glory greater than any other Russian Sovereign ever. This glory will force its way to an even greater one: with the Crimea, dominance over the Black Sea will be achieved.

And he finished: 'Russia needs paradise.'¹⁶

Catherine hesitated: would it lead to war? Could not they just take the port of Akhtiar instead of the whole Khanate? Potemkin lamented Catherine's caution to Harris: 'Here we never look forward or backward and are governed solely by the impulse of the hour ... If I was sure of being applauded when I did good or blamed when I did wrong, I should know on what I was to depend ...'. Harris at last came in useful when Potemkin extracted his assurance that Britain would not prevent Russian expansion at the cost of the Porte.¹⁷

Then, just a few weeks after Potemkin's return, Catherine gave him the 'most secret' rescript to annex the Crimea - but only if Shagin Giray died or was overthrown or he refused to yield the port of Akhtiar or if the Ottomans attacked or ... There were so many conditions that both knew that he was really free to pull off his prize if he could get away with it. 'We hereby declare our will', the Empress wrote to the Prince on 14 December 1782, 'for the annexation of the Crimea and the joining of it to the Russian Empire with full faith in you and being absolutely sure that you will not lose convenient time and opportune ways to fulfil this.' There was still a risk that the Ottoman Empire would go to war or that the Great Powers would prevent it.¹⁸

No wonder Potemkin was working so hard. He had to prepare for war with the Sublime Porte while hoping to avoid it. Catherine kept Joseph closely informed by letter on the shrewd calculation that, if he had received no surprises, he was less likely to bridle. If they were quick and the operation bloodless, they could get the Crimea before the rest of Europe could react. The clock was ticking because France and Britain were just negotiating peace in the American War. They signed the preliminaries on 9/20 January in Paris. The peace was not yet ratified, so the Russians could count on another six months. The diplomats tried to guess how far the partners would go: The views of Prince Potemkin extend themselves every day and are of such a magnitude', reported Harris, 'as to exceed the ambition of the Empress herself.'¹⁹ Sir James understated the case when he wrote that 'notwithstanding the pains he took to dissemble it', Serenissimus was 'very sorry to see our war drawing so near to its end.. .'.²°

These were Potemkin's last opportunities to enjoy the companionship of Sir James Harris. The Englishman felt he had played his last hand in Petersburg. When his friend Charles James Fox returned to the ministry as one-half of the Fox-North coalition, pursuing a pro-Russian policy, Harris demanded to be recalled while relations with Russia were friendly. Sir James and the Prince saw each other for the last time in the spring, when the latter was increasingly occupied with his southern preparations. Harris received his farewell audience from the Empress after Potemkin's departure on 20 August 1783 and then left for home.[35]

Harris had made the mistake of basing his hopes on a man who was happy to advocate an English alliance, but who was really pursuing an entirely different policy in the south. When the Austrian alliance became active, Harris's beguilement by Potemkin was exposed.

Sir James left Petersburg with high credit in London because his role as Potemkin's friend and tutor in English civilization had brought him closer to the top than any other ambassador was ever to get in Russia. But he must have had mixed feelings about Potemkin, who had so played him. 'Prince Potemkin is no longer our friend,' he sadly told Charles James Fox. Potemkin's archives show they kept in cheerful contact long afterwards. Harris often recommended travellers to the Prince: one was Archdeacon Coxe, the mem­oirist. 'I know I owe you excuses,' wrote Harris, '... but I know how you like men of letters ...'. Catherine came to regard Harris as a 'trouble-maker and intriguer'. Potemkin had 'crushes' on his friends and then moved on. He told a later ambassador that he had done much for Harris, who had 'ruined everything', and he growled at Bezborodko that Harris was 'insidious, lying and not very decent'. Their friendship was later destroyed by Britain's growing hostility to Russia - just one more sad example of the special graveyard reserved for diplomatic friendships.²¹

The Prince spent February and March 1783 preparing military plans to cover Sweden and Prussia, potential Ottoman allies against Russia, while fielding armies against the Turks and sending the Baltic fleet back to the Med­iterranean. The object of any war had to be the Ottoman fortress of Ochakov that dominated the Liman (estuary) of the Dnieper and therefore access to the Black Sea. Potemkin also turned his reforming eye to the dress and arms of the Russian soldier: in one of his barnstorming memoranda to Catherine, using his common sense and colourful colloquialisms, he proposed to reduce the burden of the common soldier by cutting out all the foppish Prussian paraphernalia. Unusually for a Russian general and an eighteenth-century commander, he actually wanted to improve the comfort of his cannon-fodder.

The Russian infantryman was expected to powder his hair and braid it, which could take twelve hours, and wear the most impractical clothes includ­ing tight high boots, stockings, expensive deerskin trousers and the pointed triangular stiff hat that did not protect against the elements. All this 'could not be better invented to depress the soldier', wrote Potemkin, who proposed: 'All foppery must be eliminated.' His denunciations of the Prussian martial hairstyle are classic Potemkin: 'About the hairdo. To curl up, to puff, to plait braids - is that soldiers' business? They have no valets. And what do they need curls for? Everyone must agree it's healthier to wash and comb the hair than to burden it with powder, fat, flour, hairpins, braids. The soldier's garb must be like this: up and ready.' Only months after becoming favourite, he also ordered officers to instruct soldiers without 'inhumane beatings' that made service disgusting and unbearable. Instead he recommended 'affec­tionate and patient interpretation'. Since 1774, he had been lightening and improving the Russian cavalry too, creating new Dragoon regiments and making the equipment and armour of the Cuirassiers easier to handle.

Years ahead of his time and unaffected by the brutish Prussomania of most Western (and Russian) generals, Potemkin borrowed from the light costumes of the Cossacks instead of the rigid uniforms of Prussian parade grounds to design the new uniform, which was to be named after him: warm comfortable hats that could cover the ears, short haircuts, puttees instead of stockings, loose boots, no ceremonial swords, just bayonets. Potemkin's new uniform set the standard for 'the beauty, simplicity and convenience of the garment, accommodated to the climate and spirit of the country'.²²

It was time to leave. He knew that if the Crimean adventure succeeded, 'I shall soon be seen in another light and then if my conduct is not approved I will retire to the country and never again appear at Court.'²³ But the Prince was dissembling again: he was convinced he could do anything. He left the capital at the height of his favour. 'They consider his eye, the eye omniscient,' Zavadovsky bitterly told Rumiantsev-Zadunaisky. Yet Harris knew there was a risk: 'Prince Potemkin will go and take the command of the army, however hazardous such a step may be to the duration of his favour.'²⁴

Finally, the Prince had a haircut, perhaps to present a more statesmanlike look. The Grand Duchess', Mikhail Potemkin wrote to Serenissimus, 'said that, after you'd had your hair cut, your image has changed for the better.' It is reassuring to see that hairstyles had political significance even two centuries before television.²⁵ All scores settled, all ties cut - mortal, political, financial and hirsute - Potemkin headed south on 6 April 1783, accompanied by a suite including his youngest niece Tatiana Engelhardt, to conquer 'paradise'.

Before attending a war, the Prince was going to attend a christening. The uncle and the sparky little Tatiana arrived at the Belayatserkov estate of Sashenka Branicka for the christening of her newborn child. Bezborodko followed Potemkin's movements from St Petersburg: 'We received a message that Prince Potemkin had left Krichev on 27 April,' the minister told Simon Vorontsov, 'and having acted as godfather in Belayatserkov, he had departed the very next day ...'. Rarely has a christening been watched so carefully by the cabinets of Europe.

The Prince's progress was unusually leisurely. He was pursued by the Empress's increasingly anxious letters. Initially, the partners relished their diplomatic balancing act like a pair of highwaymen planning a hold-up. They suspected Emperor Joseph envied Russian gains from Turkey in 1774, so Catherine told Potemkin, 'I've made my mind up not to count on anybody but myself. When the cake is baked, everyone will want a slice.' As for Turkey's friend France, she was as unperturbed by 'French thunder, or should I sat heat lightning' as she was unworried about Joseph's shakiness. 'Please don't leave me without information both on you and business.' Potemkin always knew the worth of the Austrian alliance but thoroughly enjoyed himself laughing at Joseph and his chancellor's vacillations: 'Kaunitz is acting like a snake or a toad,' he wrote to Catherine on 22 April, but he reassured her: 'Keep your resolution, matushka, against any approaches, especially internal or external enemies ... You shouldn't rely on the Emperor much but friendly treatment is necessary.'²⁶

Potemkin's agents were preparing the Tartars in the Crimea and the Kuban while his troops got ready to fight the Ottomans. Balmain was fixing the easiest piece of the puzzle: on 19 April, he procured the abdication of Shagin Giray in Karasubazaar in the Crimea itself, in return for generous subsidies and possibly another throne. 'My dove, my Prince,' exulted Catherine when she heard this news.²⁷ When the Prince finally reached Kherson in early May, he found that, as ever, Russian bureaucracy was incapable of achieving much without his driving energy. 'Lady Matushka,' he reported to Catherine in early May, 'Having reached Kherson, I'm exhausted as a dog and unable to find any sense in the Admiralty. Everything is desolate and there's not a single proper report.' Like any country boy, his thoughts about the ministers of Europe were populated with dogs, wolves and toads.

The Prince now threw himself, in a whirl of activity and anxiety, into seizing the Crimea without outside interference. The archives show this multi- talented dynamo at work. Potemkin's rescripts to his generals - Balmain in the Crimea, Suvorov and Pavel Potemkin in the Kuban - took care of every detail: the Tartars were to be treated kindly; regiments were positioned; artillery was to be brought up in case he needed to besiege Ochakov; a spy was on his way ('arrest him and send him to me'). When a colonel was too deferential to the deposed Khan, he received a dose of Potemkinian sarcasm: 'Are you the Khan's butler or an officer?' And he specified every step of the swearing of the oath of allegiance.²⁸

Meanwhile to the east of the Crimea and the Kuban, south of the Caucasus mountains, he conducted negotiations with two Georgian kings about a Russian protectorate and with a Persian satrap, along with Armenian rebels, about fostering an independent Armenian state. On top of all this, an epidemic of plague struck the Crimea, brought in from Constantinople, so quarantines had to be enforced. 'I order precautions against it - repeat the basics, inspire hygiene, visit the plague hospitals thus setting an example,' Potemkin wrote to Bezborodko. These were just some of the myriad projects Potemkin was conducting at this time. 'Only God knows how I've worn myself out.' As if this was not enough for one man, he monitored the Powers of Europe - and coped with Catherine.²⁹ He chided her: 'You've always shown me favour ... so do not decline the one I need most - take care of your health.'

Frederick the Great now attempted to ruin Catherine's plans by egging on the French to stop her. Potemkin dared the old Prussian 'huckster ... to send French troops here - we'd teach them a lesson in the Russian way'. King Gustavus of Sweden, who hoped to emulate his hero Alexander the Great, insisted on visiting Catherine, looking for chances to take advantage of Russian trouble with Turkey to reclaim Sweden's lost Baltic Empire. But his visit was delayed when his horse threw him at a military parade and he broke his arm. 'What a clumsy hero,' Catherine chuckled to Potemkin. Alexander the Great never made such a fool of himself. By the time Gustavus arrived for his visit, the Crimean cake was baked and eaten.

The Comte de Vergennes, the French Foreign Minister, sought out the Austrian envoy to Paris to co-ordinate a reaction to Russian plans. Joseph II, pushed to a decision by Catherine and afraid of missing out on Ottoman gains, suddenly rallied and informed the horrified Vergennes of the Russo- Austrian Treaty. Without support from its ally Austria, an exhausted France lacked the will to act. As for Britain, relieved to have escaped its American quicksand, Lord Grantham told Harris that if 'France means to be quiet about the Turks ... why should we meddle? No time to begin a fresh broil.'

Joseph's alliance proved decisive. 'Your prediction has come true, my cheerful clever friend,' the Empress told her consort. 'Appetite comes with eating.' So it looked as if the partners would get away with it.³°

Potemkin was so embroiled in his many activities that he now ceased writing his usual letters to Catherine. She fretted and wrote repeatedly throughout

May and June, snapping, 'While you complain there's no news from me, I thought it's me who had no news from you for a long time.' The two were getting irritated with each other, as they always did during political crises. She wanted to know if the Khan had left the Crimea so that the Tartars could take the oath of allegiance and she could publish her Manifesto on the annexation.

Potemkin, toiling in Kherson, was trying to manage the departure of Shagin, who was now delaying the enterprise despite his 200,000 rouble pension. The Tartars would not co-operate while the Khan was still there. Even though he sent his baggage to Petrovsk, the Khan's officers were discouraging the mullahs from trusting Russia. Pavel Potemkin and Suvorov at last reported from the distant Kuban that the Nogai nomads were ready to take the oath to Catherine. Everything had to be co-ordinated. The Prince was determined that the annexation should be bloodless and at least appear to be the will of the Crimean people. Finally at the end of May, Potemkin wrote that he was leaving Kherson for the Crimea: 'Goodbye Matushka, darling ... The Khan will be off in a trice.'

The Prince arrived in the Crimea and set up camp at Karasubazaar, ready to administer the oath on 28 June, Catherine's accession day. But it dragged on. While working frantically and exhausting himself, the Prince presented a picture of Oriental languor. 'I saw him in the Crimea,' wrote one of his officers, 'lying on a sofa surrounded by fruits and apparently oblivious of all care - yet amid all the unconcern Russia conquered the peninsula.'³¹

Catherine veered between longing for Potemkin and despairing of him. 'Neither I nor anyone knows where you are.' In early June, she missed him. 'I often deplore that you are there and not here because I feel helpless without you.' A month later, she was angry: 'You can imagine how anxious I must be having no news from you for more than five weeks ... I expected the occupation of the Crimea by mid-May at the latest and now it's mid-July and I know no more about it than the Pope of Rome.'³² Then she began to worry that he was dying of the plague. Presumably Potemkin had decided to wait until he could lay the entire Crimea and Kuban at Catherine's feet.

Across the ancient Crimean Khanate, the murzas and mullahs gathered in their finest robes to take the oath on the Koran to an Orthodox empress over a thousand miles away. Potemkin administered the oath himself, first to the clergy, then to the rest. The most striking sight was in the Kuban far to the east. On the fixed day, 6,000 Tartar tents of the Nogai Horde were pitched out on the Eysk steppe. Thousands of tough little Mongol horses cantered around the encampments. Russian soldiers were casually vigilant. Shagin's abdication was read to the Nogai, who then took the oath to the Empress in front of Suvorov. They returned to their Hordes, who also recited the oath. Then the feasting began: 100 cattle, 800 rams were cooked and eaten. The Nogai drank vodka - because wine was banned by the Koran. After many toasts and shouts of hurrah, the Cossacks and Nogai competed in horse races.

Then the Nogai, having lost their freedom 600 years after Genghis Khan despatched his Hordes westwards, wandered away.³³

On 10 July, the Prince broke his silence to the Empress: 'In three days, I will congratulate you with the Crimea. All the notables have already sworn, now all the rest will follow.' On 20/31 July, Catherine received Potemkin's report that the Crimean Tartars and the two Nogai Hordes had taken the oath. She was so relieved and worn out by the anticipation that she replied coolly, but, as it sank in and she received Potemkin's explanation, she appre­ciated his achievement. 'What a lot of glorious deeds have been accomplished in a short time.' His letters were immediately filled with his ideas for towns, ports and ships, laced with Classical references to his new territories. His ebullience was always infectious. When he wrote that the cowardly rumours about the plague were spread by poltroons in 'Spa and Paris', Catherine laughed at last.³⁴

A few days later, Serenissimus pulled another golden rabbit out of the hat: in the Caucasus, the Kingdom of Georgia accepted Russian protection. The Caucasus, the isthmus between the Black and Caspian Seas, was a moun- taineous patchwork of kingdoms and principalities, dominated by the empires around them - Russia, Turkey and Persia. In the north-west, Potemkin had just annexed the Kuban, ruled by the Crimeans. In the foothills, Russian generals struggled to control the wild Moslem mountaineers in Chechnya and Daghestan. South of the mountains, the Persian and Turkish empires divided the region among themselves. There, the two Orthodox Georgian kingdoms, Kartli-Kacheti and Imeretia, were almost mythical or Biblical in their romantic ferocity, so it was entirely appropriate that their tsars were named respectively Hercules and Solomon.

Hercules (Heraclius, or Erakle in Georgian), a remarkable empire-builder, seemed to be the last of the medieval knights alive and well in the century of Voltaire. The name suited the man. Scion of the Bagratid dynasty that provided Georgian monarchs for almost a thousand years, he was a warrior-king who owed his throne to his fighting for the Shah of Persia in India and had managed to create a mini-empire in the backyards of Persia and Turkey. Already an old man, 'of middle size, with a long face, large eyes and small beard, he had spent his youth', a traveller remarked, 'at the Court of Nadir Shah where he contracted a fondness for Persian customs ...'. Hercules was 'renowned for his courage and military skill. When on horseback he always has a pair of loaded pistols at his girdle and, if the enemy is near, a musket flying over a shoulder ...'. The other Georgian Tsar, Solomon of Imeretia, was just as striking for, repeatedly overthrown and then restored, he had 'lived like a wild man for sixteen years in caverns and holes and frequently, by his personal courage, escaped assassination'. He too lived with a musket over his shoulder.³⁵

When the Russians went to war in 1768, Catherine had helped Hercules and Solomon but abandoned them after 1774 to the vengeance of Shah and Sultan. Potemkin was emboldened by his Austrian alliance and decided to increase the pressure on the Ottomans by talking to the Georgians. He corresponded with Hercules, inquiring if he was now at peace with Solomon: he wanted both kingdoms for Russia.

On 31 December 1782, King Hercules told the 'Merciful and Serene Prince' that 'I am entrusting myself, my children and my Orthodox nation' to Russia. Serenissimus ordered his cousin, who commanded the Caucasus corps, to conduct negotiations. On 24 July 1783, Pavel Potemkin signed the Treaty of Georgievsk with Hercules on the Prince's behalf.³⁶

Serenissimus, still encamped at Karasubazaar in the Crimea, was delighted. His Classical-cum-Orthodox exuberance at the news of another magnificent present to the Empress was irresistible:

Lady Matushka, my foster-mother, the Georgia business is also brought to an end. Has any other Sovereign so illuminated an epoch as you have? But it is not just brilliance. You have attached the territories, which Alexander and Pompey just glanced at, to the baton of Russia, and Kherson of Taurida [Crimea] - the source of our Christianity and thus of our humanity - is already in the hands of its daughter.[36] There's something mystic about it. You have destroyed the Tartar Horde - the tyrant of Russia in old times and its devastator in recent ones. Today's new border promises peace to Russia, jealousy to Europe and fear to the Ottoman Porte. So write down this annexation, unempurpled with blood, and order your historians to prepare much ink and much paper.³⁷

Catherine was impressed. Thanking him for his achievements, she ratified the treaty, which confirmed Hercules' titles, borders and right to coin his own currency. In September Pavel Potemkin built a road out of a bridlepath and galloped in an eight-horse carriage over the Caucasus to Tiflis (now Tbilisi). In November, two Russian battalions entered the capital. The Prince began to supervise the building of forts on Russia's new border while two Georgian tsareviches, sons of Hercules, set off to live at the cosmopolitan Court of Potemkin.³⁸

And there was more. The failure of Voinovich's Caspian adventure two years earlier had not discouraged Potemkin's plans for an anti-Ottoman alliance with Persia. Bezborodko, one of the few who understood Potemkin's geopolitical schemes, explained that the Prince planned not only this eastern version of the Austrian alliance. He had persuaded Catherine, in the Crimean rescript, to authorize him to push for the Caspian to create two other principalities: one Armenian (today's Armenia) and another on the Caspian seashores (today's Azerbaijan) that might be ruled by Shagin Giray, the deposed Crimean Khan.³⁹

By early 1784, Potemkin was negotiating with the Persian Khan in Isfahan about whether he might also join the Empire, giving him a chance to found his Armenian kingdom. 'Armenia raises its hands to the sacred throne of Your Imperial Majesty asking for deliverance from the Aga's yoke,' declared Potemkin to the Empress.⁴⁰ Negotiations with Persian potentates, the Khans of Shusha and Goya, and the Armenians of the Karabak, continued well into 1784.[37] Potemkin sent an envoy to Isfahan, but the Khan died and the envoy came home. Ultimately, the Persian-Armenian Project led to nothing. For now, his gains were substantial enough.

Catherine was delighted and praised him as an empress, lover and friend: 'For all the labours exerted by you and the boundless care of my affairs, I cannot sufficiently express my recognition to you; you yourself know how sensitive I am to merit and yours are outstanding, just as my friendship and love for you are. Let God give you health and ever greater powers of body and soul.'⁴¹

In late August 1783, the Prince collapsed with a dangerous fever. Exhausted by his massive projects, perpetual travel, proximity to plague and bad water, Potemkin lay close to death in a pretty Tartar cottage amid the verdant pastures of Karasubazaar.

Potemkin could not rest - but his health improved in mid-September. Europe still rumbled at Russia's achievement. As his fever ebbed and flared up again, he inspected Russian forces. In what became a pattern, even a tradition, Catherine, Bezborodko and the ambassadors followed every spasm back in Petersburg. When he moved to the regional capital of the south, Kremenchuk, away from plague-ridden Crimea and Kherson, Catherine, ever the concerned wife, wrote, 'You never take care of yourself while recovering. Just do me this favour, for once remember the importance of your health: the well-being of the Empire and my glory.' She knew that the conquest and development of the south depended on him: 'The most important enterprise in the world will turn into nothing without you. I praise your moving to Kremenchuk but this should not be done in the very depth of dangerous illness, I was horrified to hear you had covered 300 versts in such a state.'⁴¹

The two Russian imperialists savoured their success. Potemkin lost himself in romantic neo-Classical dreams, while Catherine reacted with crude, almost Stalinesque satisfaction: 'Upon the envy of Europe, I look quite calmly - let them jest while we do our business.' She reaffirmed his permanence: 'Know that I am committed to you for a century.'⁴³ To show it, she allotted 100,000 roubles to build him a new house that was to become the Taurida Palace.⁴⁴

He could not stop working. He knew that the Nogai Hordes would always create instability in the Kuban, so in a move that foreshadowed later stains on Russian history he drew up a plan to move the nomads and resettle them between the Volga and the Urals. The rumours reached the Nogai. Meanwhile that irritating Genghizid popinjay, Shagin Giray, lingered in the Taman and kept in contact with the Nogai Hordes. Perhaps encouraged by him, these had barely left Suvorov's barbecued banquet on the steppe than they mas­sacred their pro-Russian murzas. The energetic Suvorov immediately pursued the rebels and slaughtered them on 1 October.⁴⁵

The Russian Ambassador to the Porte was Potemkin's university friend Yakov Bulgakov, who now monitored the Ottoman reaction while negotiating a trade agreement. He reported that the Turks 'won't quarrel over the Crimea if no new circumstance comes from Europe'. The final Treaty of Versailles ended the War of American Independence on 23 August/3 September, but it was too late. Prussia and France tried to raise some resistance and, in late September, Catherine still expected an Ottoman declaration of war 'at any minute', but Joseph had held firm against Vergennes and Frederick.⁴⁶ The Kaiser even acclaimed 'the success of Prince de Potemkin' to the Empress: 'I know very well the value and difficulty in finding such good and loyal serviteurs like him and how rare it is in our profession to find someone who understands us.' On 28 December 1783, the Turks implicitly recognized the loss of the Crimea in the new convention of Ainalikawak, negotiated by Bulgakov.⁴⁷

Letters and praise poured into Potemkin's Chancellery. It was true that he had now 'risen to the highest degree of power that Sovereigns accord to individuals', as his general Igelstrom wrote to him.⁴⁸ More than that, 'what the centuries had not completed, what Peter I had not managed', wrote the writer GHnka, 'this giant of his time was able to achieve'.⁴⁹ Catherine missed him most of all, writing her simplest confirmation of their partnership in early October: 'Let God make you better and return here. Honestly when I am without you, I often feel I am without hands.' The Prince replied that 'Thank God, I get better every hour ... and when I'm fully recovered, I'm coming to see my dear matushka.'⁵⁰

Prince Potemkin returned to Petersburg in late November 1783 to find courtiers hostile to him in paroxyms of jealousy. His ally Bezborodko was beleaguered, so Potemkin defended him, only to find himself beset by enemies. 'The envy of many', observed Bezborodko, grateful for Potemkin's support, 'is clear.' This took the form of an intrigue to discredit Serenissimus.

The Empress had been told that the outbreaks of plague in the south were somehow due to Potemkin's negligence. She was sensitive on the subject, after Moscow's Plague-Riot of 1770. There were allegations that Italian settlers arriving to farm the southern steppes had died because there were no houses for them. Both the allegations were false - he had worked especially hard to limit the plague, and had succeeded. It must have been depressing to achieve so much and travel so far only to find he had to fight his corner on his return. The plot, according to Bezborodko, was hatched by the Navy Minister, Ivan Chernyshev, who had most reason to resent Serenissimus' success because Grand Admiral Potemkin was building his own Black Sea fleet outside the remit of the Navy College. Princess Dashkova, back from her travels, and even Lanskoy were somehow involved too. These accusations led to a row between the partners and a coldness descended over these two proud states­men.⁵¹

Potemkin stopped calling on Catherine. Lev Engelhardt, another cousin from Smolensk who had just joined the Prince's staff as an adjutant, left a graphic account of this time. Usually the road, known as Millionaya (Millionaire's Row), in front of Potemkin's house adjoining the Winter Palace was so crowded with carriages and petitioners that it was impossible to pass. But now, at the height of his success, it was deserted. His enemies rejoiced.

On 2 February 1784, Serenissimus woke up late as usual. His valet had placed a little envelope with the imperial seal beside his bed. The Empress, who had been up since seven, had typically ordered that the Prince should not be woken. Potemkin read the letter and called for his secretary, Vasily Popov. 'Read!', he said. Popov ran into the anteroom, where adjutant Engelhardt was on duty: 'Go and congratulate the Prince. He's promoted to field- marshal.' Engelhardt went into the bedroom and congratulated his master. The Prince-Field-Marshal jumped out of bed, threw on a greatcoat, wrapped his pink silk scarf round his neck and went off to see the Empress. He was also raised to President of the College of War. Furthermore, on his recommendation, the Empress created the province of Tauris, the Classical name for the Crimea, and added it to Potemkin's vast viceroyalty of New Russia. Within two hours, his apartments were full. Millionaya was blocked by carriages again. The courtiers who had been coldest grovelled the lowest.⁵² On 10 February, Catherine dined as Potemkin's guest in one of his nieces' houses.

The Prince impulsively decided he wanted to see Constantinople, so he asked Bulgakov: 'What if I come as a guest to you from the Crimea by ship? Seriously I want to know if it is possible.' Potemkin's request was not merely romantic impulse - though much of it was his desire to see the city of Caesars. He knew now what he wanted to do, how much he wanted to build in the south, and for that he needed time and peace. He surely wanted to go to Tsargrad to negotiate this peace with the Sultan himself. Ambassador Bul­gakov must have dreaded the very prospect. On 15 March, he replied from Istanbul that it would be exceedingly complicated. 'They think', he explained, 'that you are our Grand Vizier.'⁵³ Potemkin never saw Constantinople - but his destiny was in the south. From now on, he planned 'to pass the first four

or five months of each year in his provinces'.⁵⁴ In mid-March, the Prince left St Petersburg again. There were cities to build, fleets to float, kingdoms to found.

PART SIX

The Co-Tsar 1784-1786

i8

EMPEROR OF THE SOUTH

Is it not you who put to flight

The mighty hordes of vulturous neighbours

And from vast empty regions made

Inhabitable towns and cornfields

And covered the Black Sea with ships

And shook the earth's core with your thunder?

Gavrili Derzhavin, The Waterfall

'Every hour I encountered some fresh, fantastic instance of Prince Potemkin's Asiatic peculiarities,' wrote the Comte de Damas, who observed the energetic and creative way the viceroy of the south worked in the late 1780s. 'He would move a guberniya [province], demolish a town with a view to building it somewhere else, form a new colony or a new industrial centre, and change the administration of a province, all in a spare half- hour before giving his whole attention to the arrangement of a ball or a fete .. .'.^I This was how Westerners saw the Prince - a wizardly satrap ordering cities as he commissioned ball-dresses for his mistresses. They always presumed that 'barbaric' Russians could never really do anything properly, not like Germans or Frenchmen, so that Potemkin's work must surely be flawed. When it turned out that Potemkin did do things properly and that his achievements appeared almost miraculous in their imagination and execution, jealous Westerners and Russian enemies propagated the big lie of his sham 'Potemkin Villages'.

The reality of Potemkin's achievements in the south, in the fifteen years allotted to him, was remarkable. 'Attempts have been made to ridicule the first foundations of towns and colonies,' wrote one of his earliest biographers. 'Yet such establishments are not the less entitled to our admiration ... Time has justified our observations. Listen to the travellers who have seen Kherson and Odessa .. Л² The so-called 'Potemkin Villages' are cities today with millions of inhabitants.

Russia underwent two massive leaps of expansion in the south: the reigns of Ivan the Terrible, who annexed the Khanates of Astrakhan and Kazan, and of Catherine the Great. Potemkin was, as Pushkin and others recognized, the mastermind and energy behind Catherine's successes in the south. Pot­emkin did not invent these policies: as the Russian historian Kliuchevsky put it, colonization is 'the basic fact of Russian history'. But Potemkin was unique in combining the creative ideas of an entrepreneur with the force of a soldier and the foresight of a statesman. He also brought the south to the north: while, under Panin, Russia pursued the Northern System, under Potemkin the south was Russia's foreign policy.

The Prince became the Governor-General (namestvo) of New Russia, Azov, Saratov, Astrakhan and the Caucasus soon after rising to favour, but in the late 1770s and certainly after the annexation of the Crimea, he became the effective co-ruler of the Russian Empire. Just as Diocletian saw that the Roman Empire was so vast that it required Emperors of the East and West, so Catherine let Potemkin run the south and control it absolutely. Potemkin had grown since 1774 - in stature as well as girth. He was made for the wide open steppes of the south and he could not be confined to Court. Petersburg was now too small for the both of them.

Potemkin's power was both vertical and horizontal, for he was in charge of the army at the College of War and commander-in-chief of all irregular forces, especially the Cossacks. When he began to build the Black Sea Fleet, it reported not to the Admiralty in Petersburg but to him as Grand Admiral. However, most of all, his power depended on his own personality, the prestige of his successes, such as the Crimea, and his ability to create ideas and force their execution - and no longer just on his closeness to Catherine.

Serenissimus deliberately ruled his Viceroyalty - the names and borders of the provinces changed but, essentially, they comprised all the new lands annexed between 1774 and 1783, from the River Bug in the west to the Caspian Sea in the east, from the mountains of the Caucasus, and the Volga across most of the Ukraine almost as far as Kiev - like an emperor. It was unique for a Russian tsar, such as Catherine, to delegate so much power to a consort - but the relationship between them was unparalleled.³

Serenissimus set up his own Court in the south that rivalled and com­plemented Catherine's in the north. Like a tsar, he cared for the poor folk, disdained the nobility, and granted ranks and estates in his lands. Potemkin travelled with a royal entourage; he was greeted at towns by all the nobles and townsfolk; his arrival was marked by the firing of cannons and the giving of balls. But it went further than just the trimmings of royalty. When he issued his orders, he did so in the name of the Empress, but he also listed his endless titles and medals as a king might. His commands too were absolute: whether it was a gardener or an engineer, his subordinates usually had a military rank and their orders were military in style. 'Equalling in his power the mightiest kings,' recalled Wiegel, 'I doubt even Napoleon was better obeyed.'⁴

The Prince liked to appear majestically languid - as he is remembered in so many memoirs - but this was something of a pose. He ruined his health with the mammoth quantity of work he conducted. Probably, he was more like a school swot who tries to appear to do no work while cramming all night. By the early 1780s, he governed through his own private Chancellery, which had at least fifty clerks in it, including specialists in French and Greek correspondence.⁵ He even had his own effective prime minister - the indefatigable Vasily Stepanovich Popov, whom he, and later the Empress, trusted absolutely. Like Potemkin, Popov gambled all night, slept half the day, never took off his uniform and was always ready even in the middle of the night to respond to the Prince's famous call, usually from his bed, of ' "Vasily Stepanovich!' All you heard was "Vasily Stepanovich!".'⁶ If Popov was his chancellor, the equally tireless Mikhail Leontovich Faleev, a young merchant he met during the First Russo-Turkish War, became his quartermaster, contractor and collaborator in gargantuan works. His portrait shows the weary, shrewd blue eyes, slim, disciplined, tidy and handsome face of this most unusual Russian entrepreneur, wearing his blue coat and white ruffles. Potemkin had him ennobled and he amassed a great fortune but, unusually for merchant princes, Faleev was honoured and loved in the town he built with Serenissimus - Nikolaev. They were in constant correspondence.⁷

Potemkin was in perpetual motion, except when paralysed by bouts of depression and fever. However many cities he founded, wherever he was, whether alone in a kibitka sledge, with the Chancellery hundreds of versts behind, or in a palace, the capital of this southern empire was the creative yet flawed and tormented figure of Potemkin himself.

Potemkin's career began and ended with his love for the Cossacks. First he destroyed the Zaporogian Cossacks and then he recreated them by rebuilding their Host at the heart of the imperial army. On an island in the midst of the broad Dnieper river - hence their name 'za-porogi', 'beyond the rapids' - lived a unique republic of 20,000 martial men, who controlled a huge triangle of barren territory north of the Black Sea. The Zaporogians did not farm, because farming was done by slaves and these were freemen - the very word Cossack deriving from the old Turkic for freeman. But, like most Cossacks, their Sech was a brutal democracy which elected a hetman - or ataman - in wartime. They had their own laws: treason was punished by being sewn into a sack and tossed into the rapids. Murderers were buried alive in the cold embrace of the cadavers of their victims, to whom they were bound.

They were unusual for Cossacks in many ways. They were as happy on their sixty-foot, reed-lined and oar-propelled boats - the chaiki or 'seagulls' - as on horseback. They were said to be the inventors of the first submarine, using sand as ballast and a wooden pipe through which to breathe. The Zaporogian Cossacks did not live with women. No female was allowed inside their sech or 'clearing' to preserve the military discipline they held paramount: 'they were bachelors', Lev Engelhardt explained, 'like the Knights of Malta'.

These 'Boat Cossacks' sported handlebar moustaches, shaven heads with one long ponytail, Turkish pantaloons with gold thread, silken cummerbunds, satin kaftans, high fur hats and turbans often with ostrich feathers and jewelled insignia. Their true profession was war. When they did not fight for themselves, they fought for others, sometimes as mercenaries - in the mid- seventeenth century, some Zaporogians were lent by the King of Poland to fight Spain at Dunkirk, under the Prince de Conde, and twice that century their fleet of almost 100 chaiki had raided Constantinople itself.

The Cossacks had developed as freebooting guards of the Russian frontiers, but by 1774 their unruly independent Hosts were no longer needed to protect against the Turks - and the Sech stood in the way of Russia confronting the Tartars. The Ukrainian Cossacks under Mazeppa had abandoned Peter the Great and joined Charles XII of Sweden. Cossack raiders had started the Russo-Turkish War in 1768 and the Zaporogians had several times robbed Russian troops on the way to the front. Recently, the Yaik and Don Cossacks begat Pugachev. During the war, Potemkin had developed special links with the Sech - he was an honorary Zaporogian. Indeed, in May 1774, he wrote to his Cossack friends from Tsarskoe Selo, telling them of his rise to power and promising that 'I have told the Sovereign about everything.' Nonetheless, as soon as the Pugachev Rebellion was suppressed, he changed his tune, warned them to stop their plundering and recommended the liquidation of the Sech and the reorganization of all the Cossack Hosts. Indeed they were a proven liability to the Russian state - and to Potemkin's plans to colonize and cultivate new territories.

At dawn on 4 June 1775, Russian troops under Potemkin's orders approached the Sech, surrounded it and ordered it to surrender or face destruction. The Sech that he called 'the foolish rabble' surrendered without resistance. Potemkin wrote Catherine's Manifesto for her, which was pub­lished on 3 August 1775 - 'all their violence should be cited - the reasons why such a harmful society will be destroyed'.⁸ The Zaporogians were not killed: only three leaders, including their wealthy Hetman Kalischevsky, were despatched to the Arctic monastery of Solovki on the White Sea. They were resettled as Astrakhan Cossacks, but many of them fled to fight for the Turks: Potemkin was to lure them back in the 1780s.⁹ Nor was the Sech alone: the Yaik Host was moved and renamed; Don Cossacks were reformed too and brought under Potemkin's direct control: he appointed their new hetman and the committee that would manage their civil affairs.¹⁰ The overmighty Don Hetman, Efremov, was arrested, though Potemkin protected him and his family.¹¹

Potemkin immediately suggested that the loyal Zaporogians be formed into special regiments. Catherine feared the Cossacks after Pugachev, so he bided his time, but he built a Cossack flotilla on the Caspian and Azov Seas.¹¹ He

treated the Cossacks so kindly that noblemen grumbled that he was in love with them. He certainly surrounded himself with loyal Zaporogians. He also made sure that runaway serfs, found among these frontiersmen, should not be returned to their masters. It says much that Potemkin was loved by them in his lifetime: he earned the title 'Protector of the Cossacks'.¹³

Yet the destruction of the Zaporogians is always listed as one of Potemkin's crimes - especially in modern Ukraine, where the Sech is regarded as the forerunner of the Ukrainian state. But the Sech and other Hosts were doomed after Pugachev, their territory was unsettled, uncultivated and in the way of Russia's drive to the Black Sea. Their removal allowed the annexation of the Crimea. Serenissimus is criticized for removing treasures from Zaporogian churches and distributing the lands to his cronies - yet, since he was not there himself, he ordered General Tekeli to inventory all church plate and give it to the Church.¹⁴ (Anyway, the majority of their jewels were themselves stolen.) The distribution and cultivation of land was the entire point of the annexation. He resettled these lands with Greeks who had fought for Orlov-Chesmensky and, later, state peasants from the Russian interior, and began building fortresses to protect them. Indeed, one modern historian argues that it was cultivation of these steppes that provided Russia with the resources and food supply to defeat Napoleon in 1812.¹⁵

On 31 May 1778, Catherine approved Potemkin's plan for a Black Sea port called Kherson, a sonorous name, ringing with his neo-Classical and Orthodox dreams of Khersoneses. This was the city made possible by the peace with Turkey and the liquidation of the Zaporogians.¹⁶ Docks were ordered. Carpenters were demanded from all over the empire. On 25 July, the Prince chose one of the Admiralty's officers to be its first governor - Ivan Abramovich Hannibal. Probably, Potemkin was attracted to the exotic history of this man and his connection to Peter the Great.

He was the half-black eldest son of Peter the Great's famous blackamoor, Abraham Hannibal, an Abyssinian prince bought in Istanbul for the Tsar and adopted by him. Naming him for obvious reasons after Scipio's adversary, Peter educated his ward, promoted him and stood as godfather to his son Ivan. Pushkin, who wrote the (uncompleted) 'Blackamoor of Peter the Great\ was the great-nephew of Ivan Hannibal. Pushkin's grandfather Osip Hannibal was a poor father, so the poet's mother was actually brought up in the household of Potemkin's first governor of Kherson. Ivan Hannibal was as proud of his ancestry as Pushkin. When he died in 1801, the tombstone read: 'The sultriness of Africa bore him, the cold calmed his blood.' His portrait in the Kherson State Historical Museum shows the dark skin and fine Abyssinian features of his father and the straight hair and stockiness of his Russian mother. Now Catherine ordered Hannibal to proceed with this massive task.

Potemkin's first town was designed to be both the base for his new Black

Sea Fleet, which so far existed only in a small way in the minor Russian ports of the Sea of Azov, and an entrepot for Mediterranean trade. The placing of this port was a difficult decision because Russian's gains in 1774 had given it a narrow corridor to the Black Sea. Its access was via the mouth of the Dnieper river, one of the great waterways of Rus, which reached the Black Sea through a narrow, shallow estuary called the Liman. At the end of the Liman on the Kinburn spit, Potemkin had built a small fortress. But the Ottomans kept the powerful fortress-town of Ochakov on the other bank, which effectively controlled the delta. There was no ideal place that was both defensible and a natural harbour. The naval engineers favoured Glubokaya Pristan, a deep harbour, but it was indefensible, so Potemkin chose a site further up the Dneiper where a fortress named Alexandershanz already stood. There was an island in the river that protected the port and docks. The Dnieper rapids made it hard to reach without using 'camels', while a bar beneath the town obstructed access to the Sea. Worse than that, Kherson was on the edge of the baking-hot steppes and marshy waterways and thousands of versts from the nearest ship timber, let alone food supplies.

The obstacles were overwhelming, but Potemkin repeatedly overcame them to build his city. No one in Petersburg believed it would be completed. Not for nothing did Catherine write to him: 'Kherson will never be built without you.' Simultaneously, the jealousy that was to ruin Potemkin's reputation rose even before the first stone had been laid. 'The foundation of Kherson will become famous,' fumed Zavadovsky. 'Its creator loves his project and pushes it.'¹⁷ He was right: Potemkin almost willed the town into existence and drove Hannibal relentlessly. By August, the Russo-Abyssinian had established twelve teams of workers and bought timber on the upper Dnieper in Russian Belo- russia and Poland. Everything had to be floated down the river to Kherson.

Potemkin hired over 500 carpenters and thousands of workers, founded the shipyards and planned the town. The first keels of warships were laid down in May 1779. Two more were on the way by 1781. Serenissimus decided to employ the army, which started with its own wooden barracks, using mud wattle for the walls at first. Next he imported 1,000 criminals to work the quarries.¹⁸ Then he gave the merchant Faleev his big chance, persuading him to dynamite the rocky Dneiper rapids in return for a slice of Kherson's future trade. Faleev, who invested in its success, undertook this major work. Potemkin supplied the gunpowder. By 1783, Faleev had suc­ceeded to the extent that some barges could sail straight down to Kherson. The Prince rewarded him with the rank of major, raising him to nobility.¹⁹

Potemkin's critics claimed that little was built and nothing was done well - and history has believed them. Fortunately, the well-born Westerns who visited Petersburg on their Grand Tours met Potemkin, who always directed them to Kherson. One of the first of these was a young English engineer, Samuel Bentham, brother of the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy, who was to work with Potemkin for five years. In 1780, he saw Kherson already had 180 houses and had launched one sixty-four-gunned ship-of-the-line and five frigates, and marvelled: 'He chose the spot not above two ... years ago when there was not even a hut here.' The timber, he noted, had to be floated down from a town in Poland that was later to become famous - Chernobyl.²⁰

Another intrepid Englishman, and a friend of Samuel Bentham, was Reginald Pole Carew, an Oxford graduate and Cornish landowner in his late twenties, who witnessed the next stage. He was the sort of young man who would later play the Great Game. Potemkin adopted Pole Carew, showing him his estates and fabriks (factories) round Petersburg before he headed south. Pole Carew's notes, still unpublished, read as if he was either writing a book or engaged in amateur espionage. By the time he arrived, there were already 300 houses in Kherson. Apart from nine regiments of soldiers, 'up to now the town is mainly inhabited by Polish Jews and Greeks ... Soldiers, sailors, peasants are all being used ... in building,' but he noticed that the work on the fortifications was being done too fast 'for fear of disgusting higher powers'.²¹ These were his real feelings, but he also tactfully told the Prince that 'what I see here surpasses imagination'.²²

Potemkin was determined to attract trade to his Viceroyalty. In 1781, Pole Carew discussed a potential trading business with General Hannibal, and with Kherson's two tycoons - Potemkin's merchant Faleev and the Frenchman Antoine. Faleev had founded the Black Sea Company to trade with the Ottomans and soon launched his frigate, the Borysthenes. He also had the brandy farm for Potemkin's three guberniya and supplied the soldiers with meat: Pole Carew reckoned he already made 500,000 roubles a year. Pole Carew listed the goods that could be traded in Kherson - wax, flags, rope, timber,²³ and was tempted by the trading opportunities. 'It is a bourgeois of Kherson who writes to you,' he told the Prince.²⁴

Antoine of Marseilles, later Baron de Saint-Joseph, was the town's shipping magnate. Setting off to Petersburg, he called on the Prince proposing the creation of a trading post and free port at Kherson. Potemkin was delighted,²⁵ and invited Catherine to 'abolish internal customs duties and to reconsider external ones'.²⁶ However keen he was on Britain, the Prince realized that France dominated Mediterranean trade from Marseilles and this was to have political consequences. By 1786, Antoine told Potemkin that, in the last year, eleven of his French ships had arrived from Marseilles.²⁷

Nonetheless, Kherson was a struggle. Potemkin supervised every detail when he had time: on 3 August 1783, he wrote to his engineer Colonel Gaks in Kherson, 'I'm confirming for the second time that the building of the hospital must be finished ...'. On 14 October, 'I am surprised that in spite of being assured by you that the hospital is finished, it has not even been begun ...'. Then he added: 'It's strange to me that sometimes orders are cancelled when they have been confirmed by me.' In other words, if there was any deception in the building of Kherson, Potemkin was its victim, but he could not be everywhere at once. A week later, he was ordering Gaks to build two baths to fight the plague - 'one for the absolutely healthy and another for the weak ...' and 'Don't forget to build breweries.' But Hannibal and Gaks were simply not getting things accomplished. Potemkin was frustrated. The next February, Potemkin sacked Gaks and appointed Colonel Nikolai Korsakov, a talented engineer educated in Britain. Potemkin confirmed the annual budget of 233, 740 roubles, but wanted everything finished 'in a short time' while insisting on both 'durability' and 'beauty inside'.¹⁸ The Prince himself approved every plan, each building facade - from the school to the arch­bishop's house to his own residence - and it began to take shape.¹⁹

A painting of Kherson in its Museum shows its central square as Potemkin designed it: there is the beautiful church of St Catherine's. Later, in 1790, the Prince was still beautifying it. When his favourite architect Ivan Starov came to the south, Potemkin ordered him to 'remake the cupola in the cathedral in Kherson' exactly like the one in his St Petersburg Palace, 'and fix a place for the belfry'.³⁰ It was done. The dome and the bell-tower remain exactly as the Prince ordered. Potemkin's palace stood at right angles to it.

His memoranda to his officials completely destroy the image of Potemkin in most Western accounts.³¹ These are the works of a man aware of the difficulties his officials faced. He was certainly authoritarian, concerned with the smallest details, but surprisingly flexible in giving second chances to overworked officials. Potemkin was aware as anyone that Kherson's position made it extremely vulnerable to disease. Reading between the lines, it must have been a ghastly posting. Pole Carew recorded that the shipwrights sent from Kronstadt and Petersburg had 'died off'. When ships from Istanbul and soldiers from across the Empire poured into the area as Potemkin organized the taking of the Crimea, the threat of an epidemic became serious. By 1786, the French merchant Antoine had lost his brothers and many employees. Kherson 'resembled a vast hospital: one only saw dead and dying'. The Prince tried to control local health and keep the fevers at bay.³¹ He took special care with hospitals and breweries (to provide drinking water), even telling the inhabitants to eat greens,³³ and personally appointed the doctors³⁴ to his hospitals.[38]

Everything was driven by the manic enthusiasm of the man Catherine called the 'young Colossus of Kherson'.³⁵ His infectious energy was the only thing that could triumph over the sloth of the Russian bureaucrat: returning from his new town, he spoke to James Harris 'with raptures of the climate, soil, and situation of Kherson.'³⁶ But every visit revealed more mistakes by his subordinates. That was why he began to spend more and more time away and why Catherine admitted that the trips were worth it, however much she missed him.³⁷

It is usually claimed that Potemkin concealed the mistakes in Kherson.

On the contrary. He confided a catalogue of failures to Catherine. He dismissed Hannibal - apparently for building the fortifications poorly; he could not find any sense in the Admiralty; too much money had been spent; there was not enough wood; the timber they had was unsound. 'Oh Matushka, what a mess and what dishonesty is here in the Admiralty!' It was too hot. The buildings still stood in a wilderness. 'Nobody has even had the sense to plant trees. I've now ordered it.'³⁸ He demanded more experts: 'send the staff according the enclosed list. There aren't enough smiths here. I've sent to Tula for them.'

The town continued to grow. When Kirill Razumovsky visited in 1782, he was amazed by the stone buildings, fortress, battle-ships, 'spacious suburb', barracks and Greek merchant ships: 'Imagine all this and you will understand my bewilderment for not so long ago there was nothing here but a building where beehives are kept for the winter.'³⁹ Francisco de Miranda, the South American revolutionary, who was also temporarily adopted by Potemkin, had the chance to examine Kherson in December 1786. He claimed it had 40,000 inhabitants - 30,000 military and 10,000 civilians. There were 1,200 'very good houses built on stone'.⁴⁰ After Potemkin's death, the English traveller Maria Guthrie and the Russian writer Sumarokov praised the 'hand­some town'⁴¹ with St Catherine's, fourteen churches, synagogue, 22,000 Orthodox inhabitants and 2,500 Jews.⁴²

Potemkin learned from his mistakes in Kherson. He boasted that his use of soldier-labour saved the state money, but he had a tsar's conception of budgets. Work had to be done fast, but, if it was not done correctly, like the fortress, he insisted on starting again: results were paramount, costs irrelevant to a semi-emperor who was allowed to treat the imperial Treasury as his own. However, the best rebuttal of Potemkin's critics is today's shipbuilding city. [39] Serenissimus commissioned two full-length icons for Kherson's fine neo­classical church - one of St George, the other of St Catherine, he wielding a lance and wearing Roman military uniform, breastplate and red cloak, she in a golden dress and ermine-lined red cloak. His eyes are cast upward, she looks right at us. Then it strikes one: if St Catherine is a passable likeness of the Empress, St George⁴³ is unmistakably Potemkin.f

If the fall of the Zaporogians made Kherson possible, the end of the Crimean Khanate gave Potemkin his real chance to develop the south. It also made Kherson more of a commercial town and less necessary as a naval base because the Crimea was so well endowed with harbours. Kherson perched on the steppe, while the Crimea was the marketplace of the Black Sea, the hothouse and kitchen-garden of Constantinople.

Potemkin and his Empress longed to follow in Peter the Great's footsteps. Peter had taken the Baltic from the Swedes, built a Russian fleet there and founded a city there. Now Potemkin had taken the Black Sea from the Tartars and Turks, built a Russian fleet and longed to found a Petersburg of his own. 'Petersburg established by the Baltic Sea is the Northern capital of Russia, Moscow the middle one and let Kherson of Akhtiar be the southern capital of my Sovereign,' he wrote to Catherine.⁴⁴ Kherson again! They loved the very word.

First, he attended to the creation of a port for his fleet. Akhtiar, Serenissimus told the Empress from the Crimea in June 1783, 'is the best harbour in the world'.⁴⁵ It was to be Russia's new naval base and Potemkin hurried to fortify it and build shipyards,⁴⁶ before he had even fully annexed the Khanate.⁴⁷ The Prince, of course, gave Akhtiar a Greek name: Sebastopol. He immediately founded a city in the 'natural amphitheatre on the side of a hill'⁴⁸ and ordered his engineer Korsakov to build 'a strong fortification. The Admiralty must be conveniently located for unloading' and there must be a road through the peninsula 'as good as a Roman' one. 'I shall name it the Catherine Road.'⁴⁹ The engineer agreed with Potemkin's choice for the city: 'The most suitable place there is that which Your Highness has fixed .. .'.⁵° Only four years later, when Potemkin visited the city with his friend Francisco de Miranda, the South American counted 'fourteen frigates, three ships-of-the-line of 66 guns and a gunboat'. Miranda immediately grasped the value of Potemkin's new city: the harbour could hold a fleet of 'over 100 vessels'. If faced with disaster, a fleet could be repaired within a week.⁵¹ Soon after Potemkin's death, Maria Guthrie⁵² called it 'one of the finest ports in the world'. Sebastopol remains Russia's (and Ukraine's) greatest naval base.[40]

Serenissimus was ecstatic about his Crimea, touring the peninsula while ordering his favourite engineer Nikolai Korsakov to advise on fortifications, and his scientific experts such as the botanist Hablitz, who had endured the trauma of Potemkin's Persian expedition, to report on population and fauna.

'I don't describe the beauties of the Crimea because it would take too much time ...', the Prince told his Empress in June 1783, as he annexed the peninsula and celebrated its charms, strategic potential and Classical history.⁵³ It is impossible not to share in Potemkin's feverish and exuberant fiesta of creation in that magical place with which he had fallen in love. Even today, it is easy to see why: as one passes through the Perekop Straits, past the salt lakes, which were the Khan's major source of income, the northern Crimea appears flat, arid, monotonous. But an hour to the south and it changes completely into a lush garden of Eden that most resembles the vineyards of southern Italy or Spain. Hills of greenery and vines rise to the battlements of medieval Genoese fortresses overlooking white cliffs and azure bays. Pot­emkin, who adored gardens, began to plant trees, celebrating the birth of the Grand Duke's children by laying out avenues of bay trees and olive groves. He imagined the Empress visiting his 'paradise'. The Romanovs in the next century and the twentieth-century Politburo apparatchiks were to make the Crimea their elite holiday resort, but Potemkin, to his credit, always wanted it to be far more than that.⁵⁴

His first moves were to protect the Moslem Tartars from the brutish philistinism of his own soldiery: again and again, he ordered his generals to 'treat the inhabitants kindly and not to offend them. The chiefs of... regiments must set an example.'⁵⁵ He put special observers with regiments to keep an eye on their behaviour - or, as he put it, 'for the villages' protection' - and report to him 'all forbidden actions', and placed the Taurian region under Crimean murzas, especially the renegade Iakub Aga, who had become Yakov Izmailovich Rudzevich.⁵⁶ As he told Catherine, he gave money to maintain mosques and muftis. Indeed, when he travelled through the Crimea with Francisco de Miranda, he always met the local mufti and made a donation to his mosque.⁵⁷ Potemkin gave the Tartar murzas Russian nobility and the right to own land.⁵⁸ Typically, he formed a Tartar Crimean army, a little one for display.⁵⁹ It was traditional Russian imperialism to co-opt the Moslem hierarchies, but Potemkin's sensitive care for them is unusual in a Russian soldier of any epoch.

The Tartars were not farmers and never developed the land: 'This peninsula may become even better if we get rid of the Tartars by making them leave ... God knows, they are not worth this soil and the Kuban is a suitable place for them.' Potemkin shared the instincts of Russian imperialists to uproot people like chess pieces - but, he did not move them. In fact, he often favoured them and went to great lengths to make them stay. But thousands of the Tartars left anyway: their attitude was neatly put in the back-handed compliment of a Crimean mufti to Miranda: he remembered Potemkin taking the Crimea as 'a woman remembers the man who deflowers her'.⁶⁰

Potemkin decided that the Crimean capital should be built on the Tartar town of Ak-mechet in the dry, flat middle of the peninsula: he called it Simferopol, still the capital today,⁶¹ and still the same flat, carefully laid- out, dull city created by Potemkin.⁶¹ The massive scale of Potemkin's plans extended from Kherson to Sebastopol, from Balaklava, Theodosia, Kerch,

Yenikale and back to Kherson again. In all these places, new cities were founded or existing fortresses expanded into towns. But Colonel Korsakov was equal to all this. 'Matushka,' Potemkin raved to Catherine , 'we've never had an engineer like Korsakov before ... This man has to be looked after.'⁶³ Within five years, Sebastopol and its fleet were ready to be inspected by the two Caesars of the east.

In 1784, Potemkin decided to build a sumptuous capital for this southern Empire - a veritable new Athens - on the site of a small Zaporogian village called Palavitsa. He wished to call it 'Ekaterinoslav'. Incapable of doing anything by halves, he fell in love with the name because it meant 'Catherine's Glory' and he wanted to use it everywhere. (Indeed he also used it to rename his entire Viceroyalty.) 'Most Merciful Sovereign,' wrote the Prince, 'where, if not in the land devoted to your glory, should there be a city with magnificent buildings? That is why I undertook the development of projects that would suit the high name of this city.' Potemkin envisaged a neo-Classical metropolis: its law courts were to resemble 'ancient basilikas', its marketplace a huge semi-circle 'like the Propylaeum, or threshold of Athens'. The governor- general's house would be in 'Greek and Roman style'.⁶⁴

Catherine, whose visions of Classicism and altruism were the same as his, approved his plans.⁶⁵ Serenissimus considered possible designs for over a year. Finally, in 1786, the French architect Claude Giroir produced his design for a central square and a grid of streets at right angles to the Dnieper, but Potemkin's architect Starov perfected the final plans. In January 1787, the Prince proudly displayed them to Francisco de Miranda, who was impressed with their 'Roman grandeur and architectural taste'. Potemkin wanted to employ 16,000 workmen for nine or ten years. Miranda wondered if it would ever be completed.⁶⁶

Nothing in his career provoked such mockery as Ekaterinoslav. The build­ing of a town here was necessary to develop the empty Zaporogian steppes, but the sin was its grandeur. Even the anti-Potemkin lies are interesting because of the light they shed on the extent to which Potemkin's enemies would go to blacken his name. Most histories claim Potemkin founded Ekaterinoslav in an unhealthy place and almost immediately had to move it, due to his own incompetence. It is true that in 1778, six years earlier, he had allowed a provincial governor to found a settlement for Armenians and Greeks, the Crimean refugees, on the River Kilchen, using the name 'Eka­terinoslav'. Now he simply took the name for his 'famous city', but he did not move the original one, which already had Greek, Armenian and Catholic quarters with three churches⁶⁷ and almost 3,000 inhabitants. He simply renamed it Novomoskovsk.⁶⁸

His enemies said the Prince planned to build a cathedral in the middle of this heretofore empty steppe larger than St Peter's in Rome, like the African dictator of a penniless state building the biggest cathedral in the world in the middle of the jungle. Ever since, historians, even Potemkin's only modern biographer George Soloveytchik, have repeated this embarrassing ambition as a sign of the Prince's overweening delusions of grandeur.⁶⁹ However, Potemkin may have mentioned St Peter's but he never actually proposed building it: in his letter to Catherine, he wrote, 'I imagine here an excellent cathedral, a kind of imitation of St Paul's-outside-the-walls-of-Rome, devoted to the Transfiguration of God, as a sign of the transformation of this land by your care, from a barren steppe to an ample garden, and from the wilderness of animals to a home, welcoming people from all lands.'⁷⁰ San Paolo-fuori- le-mura was admittedly an ambitious undertaking, but not quite as absurd as St Peter's. It is unlikely Catherine would ever have signed off on a copy of St Peter's nor assigned the huge tranches of two and three million roubles to the development of the south if Potemkin's ideas were so ludicrous. Somehow, St Peter's was substituted.

The only part of the city that existed from the beginning was the University of Ekaterinoslav, with its own musical conservatoire.^7I He immediately moved the Greek gymnasium, founded on his Ozerki estate as part of the Greek Project, to his New Athens, saying he had saved enough to rebuild the school there.⁷² The conservatoire was closest to his lyrical heart. 'It's the first time', sneered Cobenzl to Joseph in November 1786, 'someone has decided to establish a corps de musique in a town before it's even been built.'⁷³ Potemkin hired Giuseppe Sarti, his personal composer-conductor, as the first head of the conservatoire. It was not just Sarti: the Prince really was hiring musical staff in Italy before a city was constructed. 'Enclosed, I have the honour of presenting you, Monseigneur, the bill of 2800 Roubles for the order of Your Highness,' wrote a certain Castelli from Milan on 21 March 1787, 'to Monsieur Joseph Canta who has passed them to the four Professors of Music ... They plan to leave for Russia on the 26th .. Л⁷⁴ The destiny of the four Milanese professors is unknown.

In 1786, he ordered local Governor Ivan Sinelnikov to enrol two painters, Neretin and Bukharov, as professors of art at the university, with salaries of 150 roubles. Even in the midst of the war in January 1791, he ordered Ekaterinoslav's Governor to employ a Frenchman named de Guienne as 'historian at the Academy' on a salary of 500 roubles. As Potemkin told Sinelnikov, the public schools had to be improved to provide the university with good students. Overall, 300,000 roubles was assigned to the educational establishments alone.⁷⁵ This was derided. Yet it is hard to fault Potemkin's priorities when he paid as much attention to teachers as to battleships.

All this was undoubtedly eccentric, but an ability to turn his ideas into reality was at the heart of Potemkin's genius. Much that seemed ridiculous after his death seemed possible during his life: the scale on which he created not just cities but the Black Sea Fleet sounded unlikely but he alone made it happen. So the university and city could have been built - but only in his lifetime. His vision was a noble one, far wider than just the conservatoire-.

it was to be an international Orthodox college where Potemkin believed 'young people' from Poland, Greece, Wallachia and Moldavia could study.⁷⁶ As ever with the Prince, his choice of students was closely connected to his aims for the Empire and for himself. He was always trying to train better sailors for his ships. In 1787, after Catherine's visit, he united all the naval academies in the region and Petersburg and moved them to Ekaterinoslav. This was to be the academy of the Greek Project, the school for Potemkin's kingdoms.⁷⁷

The work did not begin until mid-1787, then was delayed by the war so that little of it was built. But not as little as everyone thinks. In 1790, Starov arrived in the south, and laid new plans for the whole city, especially its cathedral and the Prince's Palace, all approved by Potemkin, on 15 February 1790. The professors' residences and the administrative buildings for the university were finished. By 1792, there were 546 state buildings and just 2,500 inhabitants.⁷⁸ Its Governor, Vasily Kahovsky, reported to the Empress after the Prince's death that the town was laid out and continuing. Without its master, would it continue?⁷⁹ By 1815, a travelling official reported that it was 'more like some Dutch colony than a provincial administrative centre'.⁸⁰ Yet something of his Athens remains.

Ekaterinoslav never became a southern Petersburg; its university was never the Oxford of the steppes. The gap between hope and reality made this Potemkin's biggest failure and it has been used to discredit much else that was done well. Yet none of the historians of the last two centuries had visited Ekaterinoslav, which, like Sebastopol, was a closed city in Soviet times. When one looks more closely at the city, now called Dniepropetrovsk, it becomes clear its position was admirably chosen on the high and green bank of a bend of the Dnieper, where the great river is almost a mile wide. Potemkin's main Catherine Street became the modern Karl Marx Prospekt, still called 'the longest, widest, most elegant avenue in all the Russians' by locals. (William Hastie, the Scottish architect, expanded on this grid in his 1816 city plan.)⁸¹

In the middle of the city stands an eighteenth-century church, now newly alive with Orthodox worshippers. Its name - Church of the Transformation - is the one Potemkin suggested in 1784. It is a grand and imposing edifice, completely in proportion to the size of its city. It has a high spire, Classical pillars and golden cupola, based on Starov's original plans. Begun in 1788 during the war, completed long after Potemkin's death, in 1837, there stands the Prince's noble cathedral in the midst of the city that was supposed never to have been built.⁸² Not far from the church is a hideous yellow triumphal arch of Soviet design that leads to Potemkin Park, which still contains the massive Potemkin Palace.⁸³ It was to be another eighty years after Potemkin's death before musical conservatoires were opened in St Petersburg and Moscow. But Ekaterinoslav was to flourish most under Soviet planning when it became a toiling industrial centre - as Potemkin had wanted.[41]

Potemkin's cities advanced as he gained territory. The last cities he sponsored were made possible by the conquests of the Second Turkish War - Nikolaev, by the fall of the fortress of Ochakov, and Odessa, by the push round the Black Sea.

On 27 August 1789, the Prince scrawled out the order to found Nikolaev, named after St Nikolai, the saint of seafarers on whose day Potemkin finally stormed Ochakov. Built on a high, cool and breezy spot where the Ingul river meets the Bug about twenty miles upriver from Kherson and fifty from the Black Sea, Nikolaev was the best planned and most successful of his cities (except Odessa).

It was built by Faleev on Potemkin's precise orders, sweeping in vision, precise in detail. In a twenty-one point memorandum, he ordered Faleev to build a monastery, move naval headquarters from Kherson to Nikolaev, construct a military school for 300, fund a church from the income of local taverns, recast the broken bell of the Mejigorsky Convent, adding copper to it, cultivate the land 'according to the English method as practised by three British-educated assistants of Professor Livanov', build hospitals and rest­homes for invalids, create a free port, cover all fountains with marble, build a Turkish bath and an admiralty - and then establish a town council and a police force.

Faleev amazingly was able to parry these thrusts of energy one by one. He answered Potemkin's specific orders, 'Your Highness ordered me to' and then reported that virtually all had been done - and more, from settling Old Believer priests to sowing kitchen gardens. Shipyards were built first. Peasants, soldiers and Turkish prisoners built the city: 2,500 were working there during 1789. Faleev evidently worked them too hard because Serenissimus ordered their protection and daily rations of hot wine. There is a contemporary print in the Nikolaev Museum showing the soldiers and Turkish prisoners-of-war working on foot, supervised by mounted Russian officers. Another shows oxen dragging logs to build the city.

By October, Faleev could tell the Prince that the landing stage was finished and that the earthmoving by the conscripts and Turks would be finished within a month. There were already nine stone and five wooden barracks. In 1791, the main shipyards were moved from Kherson to Nikolaev.⁸⁴ Here we see how Potemkin worked. There is no trace of the layabout, nor of the clown who performed for Westerners, nor of the grandiose autocrat who paid no attention to detail. Potemkin pushed Faleev. 'Work quickly,' he wrote about one battleship he needed and 'Strain all your forces.' Next, he thanked him for the watermelons he had sent but added, 'You cannot imagine how my honour and the future of Nikolaev shipyard depends on this ship.'⁸⁵ The first frigate from his new city was launched before his death - and his own palace was almost complete.

Four years later, the visiting Maria Guthrie acclaimed its 10,000 inhab­itants, 'remarkably long, broad, straight streets' and 'handsome public build­ings'. The city's position even today is ideal: it is well laid out and planned, though few of Potemkin's buildings survive. Its shipyards still work where they were built by him 200 years ago.⁸⁶

Odessa was conquered by Potemkin, who ordered a town and fortress to be built there - though it was neither named nor started until after his death. When the Prince took the Ottoman fort of Hadjibey in 1789, he recognized that it was an outstanding and strategic site, ordered the old castle to be blown up and personally chose the site of the port and settlement. Work was to start immediately.

This was being done when he died, but the town was formally founded three years later by his protege Jose (Osip) de Ribas, the Spanish adventurer from Naples who had helped Orlov-Chesmensky kidnap 'Princess Tarak- anova'. 'General (later Admiral) de Ribas was accomplished in mind, artifice and talent, but no saint,' according to Langeron. His portrait by Lampi shows his foxy, ruthless and subtle face. In 1776, he married the illegitimate daughter of Catherine's friend and artistic supremo Ivan Betskoi, who had had an affair with the Empress's mother. They became one of the most politically adept couples in Petersburg. Henceforth, wherever the Prince was, Ribas was never far away. Always vigorous and competent, whether building Potemkin's ships, commanding his fleets or procuring his mistresses, Ribas joined Popov and Faleev as Potemkin's three superlative men of action.[42]

Catherine named the port after Odessos - the Ancient Greek town that was believed to be nearby - but she feminized it to Odessa. It remains one of the jewels of Potemkin's legacy.⁸⁷

'I report that the first ship to be launched will be called the Glory of Catherine - Ekaterinoslav,' wrote Potemkin over-enthusiastically to his Empress. 'Please allow me to give it this name.' The name 'Ekaterinoslav' had become an obsession. Cities, ships and regiments groaned under its grandeur. This con­cerned the prudent Empress: 'Please don't give too grandiose names to the ships, lest such loud names become a burden to them ... Do what you like with the names but free the reins because it's better to be than to seem.'⁸⁸ But Potemkin was not going to change Catherine's Glory even to protect the glory of Catherine at her own behest. So he ignored her request and, in September, proudly announced the launch from his Kherson shipyards of the sixty-six- gun ship-of-the-line named Catherine's Glory.³⁹ This is a most characteristic exchange.[43]

The Prince was right to be excited because ships-of-the-line, those hulking floating fortresses with their rows of over forty or fifty guns, the same as some entire armies, were the eighteenth century's most prestigious weapons - the equivalent of aircraft carriers. (Catherine granted Potemkin the initial 2.4 million roubles to finance this on 26 June 1786.) The construction of a whole fleet of them has been compared by a modern historian to the cost and effort of a space programme. However, Potemkin's critics claim that the ships were rotten, if they were built at all. This was nonsense. Pole Carew carefully examined the shipbuilding in progress. There were three ships-of-the-line of sixty-six guns in an 'advanced state' while frigates of thirty and forty guns had already been launched. Four more keels were laid. The state was not the only shipbuilder there - Faleev was building his merchantmen too. Down at Gluboka, thirty-five versts towards the sea, there were already seven more frigates of between twenty-four and thirty-two guns. When Miranda, who had no European prejudices and broad military experience, visited five years later, he reported that neither the timber nor the design of the ships could be bettered and considered the workmanship of a better standard than those of either Spanish or French vessels. They were built, he said, offering the highest praise one could give a ship in those days, 'in the English manner'.⁹⁰