Prince of Princes -The Life of Potemkin

This showed that he knew what he was talking about, for the German, French and Russian critics of Potemkin's ships did not realize that his timber came from the same places as timber for English warships. Furthermore, they were built by sailors and engineers trained in England such as Potemkin's admiral Nikolai Mordvinov (who married an English girl) and the engineer Korsakov. Indeed, by 1786, Kherson had an English ambience. 'Mordvinov and Korsakov both are much more like Englishmen than any foreigners I ever met,' decided that ardent traveller Lady Craven.⁹¹ Yet Kaiser Joseph, who was no expert on naval matters, claimed the ships were 'built of green timber, worm eaten'.⁹²

By 1787, the Prince had created a formidable fleet that the British Ambas­sador put at twenty-seven battleships. If one counts ships-of-the-lirie as having over forty guns, he had twenty-four of them, built in nine years, starting at Kherson. Later Sebastopol's perfect harbour became the naval base of Potemkin's fleet and Nikolaev its main shipyard. This, together with the 280 the co-tsar

thirty-seven ships-of-the-line of the Baltic Fleet, instantly placed Russian seapower almost equal to Spain, just behind France - though far behind the 174 ships-of-the-line of Britain, the world's only naval superpower.

Potemkin is the father of the Black Sea Fleet, just as Peter the Great created the Baltic one. The Prince was proudest of his fleet. It was his special 'child' and he poses in Lampi's rare portrait in his white uniform as Grand Admiral of the Black Sea and Caspian Fleets with the Euxine (Black) Sea behind him. Catherine knew it was his creation. 'It might seem an exaggeration,' a British envoy recorded Serenissimus saying, at the end of his life, 'but he could, almost literally, say that every plank, used in building the fleet, was carried on his shoulders.'⁹³

His other Herculean effort was to attract the ordinary folk to populate these vast empty territories. The settlement of colonists and ex-soldiers on the frontiers was an old Russian practice but Potemkin's campaign of recruitment, in which Catherine issued manifestos offering all manner of incentives to settlers - no taxes for ten years, free cattle or farming equipment, spirits or brewery franchises - was astonishing in its imagination, scale and success. Hundreds of thousands were moved, housed, and settled, and received welfare gifts of ploughs, money and oxen. Frederick the Great had set the standard of colonization during the retablissement of his war-torn territories by tol­erating all sects, so that, by the time of his death, 20 per cent of Prussians were immigrants. The Prince had a modern understanding of the power of public-relations. He advertised in foreign newspapers and created a network of recruiting agents across Europe. 'The foreign newspapers', he explained to Catherine, 'are full of praises for the new settlements set up in New Russia and Azov.' The public would read about the privileges granted to the Arme­nian and Greek settlers and 'realize their full value'. He also recommended the modern idea of using Russian embassies to help recruitment. Potemkin had been an enthusiastic colonist since coming to power. Even in the mid- 1770s, he was recruiting immigrants for his new settlements on the Mozdok Line of the north Caucasus.⁹⁴ His ideal settlers would plant, plough, trade and manufacture in peacetime, and, when war came, ride out against the Turks.⁹⁵

Potemkin's first settlers were the Albanians, from Orlov-Chesmensky's Mediterranean fleet of 1769, and the Crimean Christians. The former initially settled in Yenikale, the latter in their own towns like Mariupol. The Albanians were soldier-farmers. Potemkin founded schools and hospitals as well as towns for these immigrants. Once the Crimea was annexed, Potemkin formed the Albanians into regiments and settled them at Balaklava. The Prince specifically designated Mariupol for the Crimean Greeks. As with all his towns, he supervised its development, adding to it throughout his career. By 1781 the Azov Governor reported that much of it was built. There were four churches, the Greeks had their own court and it grew into a prosperous Greek trading town. Later Potemkin founded Nachkichevan, on the lower Don near Azov, and Gregoripol (named after himself, of course), on the Dniester, for the Armenians.⁹⁶

Serenissimus racked his brains to find productive citizens inside the Empire, attracting noblemen and their serfs,⁹⁷ retired and wounded soldiers, Old Believers[44] or raskolniki,⁹⁸ Cossacks and, naturally, women to make homes for them. The girls were despatched southwards like the mail order brides of Midwestern settlers in nineteenth century America.⁹⁹ Typically, Potemkin also targeted impoverished village priests.¹⁰⁰ Outside the Empire, he offered amnesty to exiles, such as fugitive serfs,¹⁰¹ raskolniki, and Cossacks who had fled to Poland or Turkey. Families, villages and whole towns of people moved, or returned, to settle in his provinces. It is estimated that, by 1782, he had doubled the population of New Russia and Azov.¹⁰²

Potemkin's campaign intensified after the conquest of the Crimea - and, using a burgeoning network of middlemen, he extended it to the whole of Europe. The population of the Crimea had been halved throughout its troubles to about 50,000 males.¹⁰³ The Prince believed that the territories boasted only 10 per cent of the populations they should contain. T am using all my powers,' he told Catherine. 'From diverse places, I have summoned colonists knowledgeable in all spheres of the economy ...'. He wielded his massive powers to decide who should and should not be taxed and how much land settlers, whether noblemen or foreigners, should receive. Immigrants were usually freed from taxes for a year and a half, later raised to six years.¹⁰⁴

The agents were paid 5 roubles per settler. 'I have found a man who is charged to bring foreign colonists to the Crimea,' one of them wrote the Prince. 'I've agreed with him to pay thirty roubles per family delivered in those places.' Later he sent Potemkin another agent with whom 'I've agreed 200 souls but he promises he can bring considerably more.'¹⁰⁵

The peasants of southern Europe were particularly fertile ground. In 1782, sixty-one Corsican families arrived to be settled near Kherson.¹⁰⁶ In early 1783, Potemkin was making arrangements to receive Corsicans and Jews recruited by the Due de Crillon. But the Prince decided, 'I do not consider it necessary to increase the number of these inhabitants except those already sent by Count Mocenigo' (who was the Russian minister in Florence). In the Prince's archives, we can follow this strange trade in honest farmers and opportunistic rascals. Some wrote directly to the Prince's Chancellery. In a typical letter, potential Greek settlers, named Panaio and Alexiano, asked to bring their family from 'the Archipelago' so that they 'can all come to make a colony bigger than that made with the Corsicans.'¹⁰⁷ Some of the agents were the worst sort of fairground hucksters: how many innocents did they gull? One suspects that landowners saw this as a convenient way to rid their estates of rogues. Potemkin did not mind. 'They will be transported to Kherson,' he wrote, 'where everything is ready to receive them.'¹⁰⁸

The Prince also managed to attract the most industrious, sober settlers any empire-builder could wish for: the Mennonites of Danzig, who asked for the right to have their own churches and no taxes for ten years. Potemkin's agent George Trappe gave them their terms - they would receive money for travel and houses when they arrived. The privileges were granted. Potemkin's letter to his Scottish banker, Richard Sutherland, shows how the chief minister of the Empire personally arranged the details of moving relatively small numbers of people across Europe: 'Monsieur, As Her Imperial Majesty has deigned to accord privileges to the Mennonites who wish to come to settle in the Government of Ekaterinoslav ... be so good as to prepare the necessary sums, in Danzig, Riga and Kherson, for their voyage and settlement ... Following the mercy that Her Imperial Majesty had deigned to grant to these good farmers, I trust there will be no obstacle in delivering the sums ... to prevent their settlement in Ekaterinoslav.'¹⁰⁹ There are many such unpublished letters in the archives. The 228 families, probably 2,000 people, set off on their long journey to found eight colonies in early 1790.¹¹⁰

At the same time, over in Kherson, he was ordering the incompetent Colonel Gaks to welcome a party of Swedes for the Swedish settlement, 'where they will find not only houses ... For foodstuffs, give five roubles to everyone.'¹¹¹ Another 880 Swedes were settled in the new city of Ekaterinoslav. Thousands of Moldavians and Wallachians, Orthodox Rumanians under Ottoman rule, also flocked across the borders. By 1782, some 23,000 had arrived. Many lived in Elisabethgrad, where they outnumbered Russians. 'A Greek of Bul­garia', reads a typical letter to Potemkin from one of his agents in 1785, 'has told me there are a number of Moldavians on the frontiers of Moldavia - it would be easy to persuade them all to come as immigrants.' No doubt they came.¹¹²

Almost uniquely among Russian soldiers and statesmen, Potemkin was more than just tolerant of Jews: he studied their culture, enjoyed the company of their rabbis, and became their champion. The Enlightenment had already changed attitudes to Jews. Empress Elisabeth had banned all these 'enemies of Christ' from the Empire in 1742. Maria Theresa hated Jews so much that, as late as 1777, when Potemkin was giving them privileges for settlement, she wrote: 'I know of no greater plague than this race.' She could not bear to set eyes on a Jew: she spoke to her banker Diego d'Aguilar from behind a screen. But her son Joseph II greatly improved their lot.¹¹³ When Catherine usurped the throne, playing the Orthodox card, she was in no position to favour the Jews. Her October 1762 decree invited all settlers 'except Jews', but she secretly let them in by ordering Count Browne, her Irish Governor- General of Livonia, specifically not to ask the religion of potential settlers."⁴

The Partition of Poland in 1772 brought large numbers of Jews - about 45,000 - into Russia for the first time. Potemkin first encountered the many who lived on his Krichev estate in ex-Polish lands. When the Prince invited settlers to the south as early as 1775, he added the rare coda: 'even Jews'. On 30 September 1777, he set the policy: Jews were allowed to settle in his lands, sometimes in 'the empty smallholdings left by Zaporogian Cossacks', providing they brought five Polish settlers each and money to invest. Later he made this more appetizing: no taxes for seven years and the right to trade in wines and spirits; they would be protected from marauding soldiers; have their disputes adjudicated by rabbis; be permitted synagogues, graveyards and the right to import their wives from Jewish communities in Poland. These immigrants were useful: apart from commerce, brickmaking, which Potemkin needed for his new towns, was a Jewish trade. Soon Kherson and Eka­terinoslav, melting-pots of Cossacks, raskolniki and Greeks, were at least partly Jewish towns.¹¹⁵

Serenissimus became especially friendly with Joshua Zeitlin, a remarkable Jewish merchant, and Hebraic scholar, who travelled with the Prince, managed his estates, built towns, arranged financial deals for supplying his armies, and even ran the restored mint at Kaffa in the Crimea - he appears throughout the archives. Zeitlin 'walked with Potemkin like a brother and friend' - a relationship unique in Russian history because the Jew remained proudly unassimilated, steeped in rabbinical learning and piety, yet standing near the top of the Prince's entourage. Potemkin promoted him to the rank of 'Court advisor,' thereby giving him noble status and allowing him to own serfs and estates. Russian Jews called Zeitlin, 'Ha-sar' - Lord. The Prince enjoyed Zeitlin's ability to do business as well as discuss Talmudic theology and they were often together. As the two inspected new roads and towns, Zeitlin 'would ride on a majestic horse alongside Potemkin.' While the Prince accepted petitions, the noble and plutocratic rabbi 'would accept halakhic queries from ... scholars. He would get down from his horse and compose halakhic responses in a kneeling position,' and then remount and ride on with Serenissimus. It is hard to overstate what an astonishing vision of tolerance this was, not merely for Russia, but for Europe.

Potemkin helped the Jews and repeatedly intervened to defend them. During Catherine's visit to the south in 1787, he even sponsored the delegation, led by Zeitlin, that petitioned her to stop Jews being called 'zhidy' - 'Yids.' Catherine received them and decreed that henceforth they should be called 'evref - 'Hebrews'. When Zeitlin clashed with the Prince's banker, Sutherland, Potemkin even backed his beloved Jews against his beloved British.¹¹⁶ A variety of Jewish rabbis soon joined Zeitlin in Potemkin's bizarre court of mullahs and priests. It was this peculiar tolerance that led his anti-Semitic noble critics to sneer that the Prince favoured any foreigners with 'a big snout' - but Potemkin was never bound by the prejudices of others.¹¹⁷

No wonder the Prince became a Jewish hero. Wherever he went, particularly in Belorussia, crowds of excited Jews prepared such elaborate welcomes that they sometimes irritated him. They would offer him 'big trays of silver, bread, salt and lemons', which Miranda, who observed these rituals in Kherson, drily described as 'doubtless some kind of hospitality ceremony'.¹¹⁸

On Potemkin's death, Zeitlin retired to his sumptuous palace at Ustye in Belorussia, where this unusual financier patronized Jewish learning in his Hebraic library and synagogue, conducted scientific experiments in his labora­tory, and held his own court, with the eccentricity and magnificence of a Jewish Potemkin. The position of Russian Jews again deteriorated. They were never again to have such an eminent protector.¹¹⁹

Next, the Prince had the idea of importing British convicts to settle the Crimea.

BRITISH BLACKAMOORS AND CHECHEN WARRIORS

But I not rising until noontime Drink coffee and enjoy a smoke; I make vacations of my workdays And spin my thoughts in chimeras

Gavrili Derzhavin, 'Ode to Princess Felitsa'

Serenissimus heard that the American War was preventing Britain from transporting its convicts to the Colonies and he saw an opportunity. His friend the Prince de Ligne was probably the source of this information, because Joseph II had considered settling them in Galicia and then decided against it. One day, Simon Vorontsov, now ambassador in London, was visited by an Irish adventurer named Dillon, who claimed that Ligne had assigned him to procure 'delinquents ... and blackamoors' to settle in the Crimea. Vorontsov, who disliked Potemkin, was appalled at the possible 'shame of Russia: all of Europe will get to know what kind of monsters were settled'. Their dissipation would make them ill and they would have to maintain themselves with their 'old profession - robbery and swindles'.[45]

In October 1785, Vorontsov was amazed to receive an imperial order, via Bezborodko, to negotiate the sending of these British criminals to Riga for transport to the Crimea. The British Government was to pay for their journey. Vorontsov saw a chance to undermine Potemkin, so he wrote to the Empress warning of the effect on her European reputation. 'Despite the prodigious influence and power of Prince Potemkin', boasted Vorontsov, the Empress decided he was right - it might damage her image in Europe. 'It is true', trumpeted Vorontsov years later, 'that Prince Potemkin never forgave me.'¹

This story was propagated by Vorontsov - and has been repeated ever since - to show Potemkin's clownish incompetence and lack of judgement. However, it was not a foolish or disgusting idea. Most of these 'delinquents' were not hardened criminals - this was a time when unfortunates were deported from England in chains on grisly prison-ships for stealing a hand­kerchief or poaching a rabbit. The ultimate penal colony, Australia, which was to become the destination of these very convicts, has flourished. The Empress, Ligne and Bezborodko, none of them fools, supported Potemkin's idea. Besides, it was a familiar concept because many Russian criminals were sent to Siberia as 'settlers'.

Some of the settlers were already semi-criminals anyway. In 1784, a ship­load of what Samuel Bentham called 'ragamuffin Italians', mainly Corsicans, arrived from Leghorn. They had mutinied on the way, killing their captain, but were captured and brought to Kherson, where they were put to work building the town. Out of this debacle comes a story that speaks for itself. There was an Englishman among these cut-throats - there is always an Englishman in Potemkin's schemes. Since he was said to be a coal-miner, he was ordered to search for coal. Bentham found him 'almost naked and living on five kopeks per day', so he mentioned his miserable compatriot to the Prince, who 'promised him a good salary, and when I said he was almost naked, he ordered me to give him 300 roubles to buy clothes. This, I think, proves no small degree of generosity - as well as a favourable disposition towards us English.'²

There is a revealing American postscript. In 1784, Americans loyal to the British Crown, who had to leave the United States, petitioned Potemkin to be welcomed as settlers. Potemkin worried that 'they may be the descendants of those people who migrated from England during the civil wars in the last century and who may be supposed to entertain opinions by no means compatible with the spirit of [Russia]'.³ So British criminals were sought, respectable American loyalists rejected. But Potemkin, who regarded Cromwell, Danton and Pugachev as much the same, was being consistent: political rebellion was much more dangerous than mere crime.

Serenissimus specified to his governors precisely how these settlers were to be welcomed at the end of their long journeys. 'The new subjects who don't know our language or customs demand defence and protection ...', he told his Crimean Governor Kahovsky. The Prince certainly decided the settlers' destinies on a whim: 'I offered to settle them on the left bank of the Dnieper. But now I think it would be easier to move them into the empty Greek lands in Taurida itself where there are already buildings.'⁴ He was constantly thinking of ways to improve their lot: 'Be so kind as to distribute bullocks, cows and horses, left behind by departing Taurida Tartars, among the new settlers,' he ordered Kahovsky, 'trying, not merely to be equable, but to help the poor.'⁵ To the Governor of Ekaterinoslav, Sinelnikov, he commanded each family to receive the same plus eight desyatins of land per head. 'A further 40 families are now coming down the Dnieper; do not fail to receive them yourself .. Л⁶ Again, this personal greeting by a busy governor sounds more like touchy-feely modern welfare than military settlement on Russian steppes.

Potemkin is often accused of abandoning these people to their fates. He could not see everything and his officials frequently lied to him. This was the reason he was perennially on the road - to ensure nothing was concealed from him. Nonetheless there must have been thousands of little miseries for some of these people. The departure of some of the settlers from the Crimea 'proves their unhappiness', Potemkin wrote to Kahovsky. 'Understand the reasons for it and carry out your duties with firmness, satisfying the offended.'⁷ His military order to 'understand' demonstrates the contradiction of trying to foster psychological sensitivity by military command.

However, many others settled happily. The archives prove that, whenever Potemkin found a lapse, he reacted immediately, like the note to Kahovsky in which he suggested five ways to overcome the villagers' 'great privations' because the state had failed to provide enough cattle: 'Only three pairs of oxen, one plough and one cart have been given to four or even more families ... '.⁸ It is remarkable to find the co-ruler of an empire actually ordering his generals to correct such a mistake and give a certain number of oxen to a specific peasant family in one village. That is what happened again and again.

He did solve security problems by transporting peoples - some of the Nogai Hordes were resettled in the Urals, Taman and north Crimea, and then moved again. Their sin was being unreliable and too close to the turbulent Caucasus. These migrations must have been sad processions, for which Potemkin bears responsibility, just as contemporary British ministers, for example, bear the shame of the slave trade.

Overall, Potemkin cared enormously and did as much as an administrator in that century could do. Later, possibly during the building of his last city Nikolaev, there is a melancholic note to Faleev about the conditions of his ordinary people: 'You have to tell me the truth. I can't just know but you should be ashamed to conceal the truth from me. I employed people to work, promising them to pay them salaries; but it was turned into hard labour. Unluckily, my name is everywhere, so that they could begin to think I am a tyrant.. Л⁹

The Prince planned to turn the Crimea and the south into the orchard of the Empire. 'This is an unbelievably good and fertile place,' he told Catherine. The Prince was evidently an early Green: at least, he instinctively understood what is now called ecology. To plant a tree to him was to help build the future of his lands, so he frequently ordered his men to 'plant paradise trees' or 'chestnuts'. On 5 August 1785, Potemkin printed an address to the nobles in the Crimea in which he autocratically required them to plant and create prosperity: 'I consider tillage the first source of riches.' It was a reliable business because the army always needed provisions and it was a service to the state. But if the land was not sown, 'it shames its owner and reproaches him with laziness'.¹⁰

He practised what he preached. 'Wishing to promote the settling of Perekop steppe and set an example', Potemkin himself took over forests and 6,000 desaytin 'for picking of canes'.¹¹ He continually ordered the directors of Crimean Agriculture, Professors Livanov and Prokopovich (who studied in England, along with students sent by Potemkin), and the botanist Hablitz, to travel the peninsula improving anything they could suggest. Apart from ordering Korsakov to build salt bridges to make the collection of salt more efficient, he sent engineers to seek bituminous coal along the Donetz and Lugansk rivers. The Taurida region even had a resident mining expert.¹²

The Prince was obsessed with using his estates and those he gave to others as trading posts between south and north. 'The boats that carry the supplies from the estates and factories of Prince Potemkin [from Belorussia] for the navy in Kherson are filled on their return with salt ...', a French diplomat explained to Paris. With his acquisition of the empty steppes of the Crimean Khanate and the Zaporogian Sech, Potemkin intended to use grants of land to encourage trade and manufacturing, especially among foreigners like the Benthams. In this too he favoured Anglo-Saxons. 'The Russians are unfit for commerce,' Potemkin later told a British envoy, 'and he was always of the opinion that the foreign trade of the empire should be carried on entirely' by Englishmen.¹³

Potemkin ordered that no land should be given out without his command. There were many ways to settle these vast lands: first, he granted massive estates to magnates, officials (like his secretary Popov and his ally Bezborodko, who was delighted with his 'almost royal' estate), foreign friends (like the Prince de Ligne), Cossack cronies and renegade Tartars - and he gave himself 73,000 desyatins on the mainland, 13,000 on the peninsula.¹⁴ If landowners did well, Serenissimus lifted taxes on them, as he did for three students of English agriculture 'for their great progresses'.¹⁵ If they wasted their gift, Potemkin was tempted to take it away from them. Many foreigners, from Genoese noblemen to English peeresses, bombarded the Prince with schemes and demands for land - but they got them only if they had an entrepreneurial plan.

'I have, my Prince, a great desire to become a proprietor of some estates here,' the seductive and pushy Countess of Craven wrote to him from the Crimea. This daughter of the Earl of Berkeley, with her curly Medusan head of hair, was already a favourite beauty of the London scandal-sheets, not unlike the Duchesses of Kingston and Devonshire, but this talented and independent woman was also a courageous traveller and an early best-selling travel-writer. After an exceedingly short marriage with the peer whose name she shamelessly used, she had been caught in flagrante with a French duke, an envoy to London, but she was also notoriously 'democratic' in her tastes, supposedly even having working-class lovers. Then she went travelling with a young lover while writing colourful letters to her suitor, the Margrave of Anspach, brother-in-law of Frederick the Great. These were later published as her Journey through the Crimea to Constantinople. She ended her geo­graphical, amorous and literary voyage in 1791 by marrying the Margrave, with whom Potemkin was also in correspondence, thereby joining the ranks of imperial petty-royalty.¹⁶

Elisabeth Craven met the Prince in Petersburg and travelled to the Crimea with his blessing. She saw the opportunities there. 'I would make a colony of honest and industrious people of my country,' she suggested. 'I'd be very happy to see my own land flower ... I tell you frankly, my Prince, I'd like to have two estates in different places of Taurida.' She appealed to his well- known romanticism, calling this her 'beautiful dream'. Her Ladyship sus­piciously begged him 'not to share this with [Harris's successor as British envoy to Russia] Mr Fitzherbert nor my compatriots', presumably because she did not wish it to reach the London newspapers. In case Potemkin was not sufficiently tempted by her offer, Her Ladyship ensured that he knew exactly who she was, signing each letter, 'Elisabeth Craven, Peeress of England, nee Lady Elisabeth Berkeley.' Potemkin's reply is unknown, but she never settled her family in the Crimea. Perhaps the Prince, who was no longer the neophyte charmed by Semple, thought this 'Peeress of England' protested too much.¹⁷

The Prince dreamed of filling his lands with prospering plantations and industrious factories: this time he wanted not soldiers but experts on agri­culture. Catherine quoted Potemkin to her German friend Dr Zimmerman: 'In Taurida, the principal matter must ... be the cultivation of the land and nurture of silkworms and consequently mulberry plantations. Cloth could be made here ... cheese-making would also be very desirable ... gardens, above all botanical gardens ... we need sensible and knowledgeable people.'¹⁸

When the Spanish officer Antonio d'Estandas requested land to found china factories not far from Simferopol, the Prince at once ordered his governor to provide 'as much land as necessary' but 'with the obligation that the factory is established without delay'.¹⁹ He stressed agriculture, orchards and flocks of sheep instead of herds of cattle,²⁰ believing the Crimea was ideal for wool and sheepbreeding. 'Making wool better with simple and correct methods,' he boasted to Catherine, 'we'll beat every country in Europe with our cloth. I ordered males from everywhere where they have the best sheep and I'm waiting for them next summer.'²¹

The Prince fostered various industries himself - particularly wine and silk. He behaved as a mixture of autocrat, banker, entrepreneur and customer. When he decided to manufacture silk, as he was already successfully doing in Astrakhan, he made an agreement with the Italian Count of Parma to produce it on a large estate. The Prince provided twenty families of peasants from his Russian estates, promising to add another twenty after five years, and lent the Count 4,000 roubles as seed money. To encourage the industry, he then bought all the silk produced locally at an inflated price.²² As for

Potemkin's success, Maria Guthrie found the 'zealous' Count still producing fine silk at the turn of the century.²³

The Prince wanted to make Ekaterinoslav the marketing centre for the silk from his Crimean mulberry plantations. A silk-stockings factory was built at a cost of 340,000 roubles and he soon sent the Empress a pair of stockings so fine that they could be preserved in the shell of a nut. 'When, my Merciful Mother,' the Prince wrote, 'you visit the dominions over which I preside, you will see your path covered with silk.'²⁴

As for wine, the Prince planted 30,000 vines of Tokay wine, imported from Hungary with Joseph's permission, in four places across the peninsula. He had been planting orchards and vineyards for years in Astrakhan, whence he brought his French viticulturist Joseph Banq to Soudak, the lush Crimean seaside village, beneath a ruined Genoese fortress, which became his wine centre. It is a tribute to Potemkin's activity that he had the gardener in place buying estates by September 1783, weeks after annexing the Khanate. Banq's sorry letters, scattered among the Potemkin archives, are bad-tempered, poorly written and often stained, as if he was writing them while watering his vines. They demonstrate the difficulties of putting Potemkin's schemes into reality. Poor Banq bitterly missed his wife - 'without my family, I cannot stay at Soudak if His Highness offered me all the world'. In any case, the work was impossible without twenty workers - not soldiers! But the workers were rude to Banq and he had to complain to the Prince again. When the vines flourished, he proudly sent Serenissimus 150 bottles of his red Soudak wine.²⁵

Banq's job was to expand the vineyards, to plant fruit orchards and raisin plantations and, as a profitable sideline, to 'build a factory of vodka as in France'. His salary in this five-year mission was 2,000 roubles a year (much more than the average Russian officer's) plus an apartment, firewood, a pair of horses and forty litre barrels of wine.²⁶ On arrival, the Frenchman grumbled that the gardens bought for him were 'not worth anything ... it hasn't been cultivated for three years ... it's a waste of time to make wine this year'.²⁷ Finally Potemkin sacked the unfortunate, who may have been caught stealing, because he begged for forgiveness while feeling 'the most horrible despair'. His fate is unknown, but another Frenchman replaced him.²⁸ 'The wine of Soudak', declared the French envoy, Comte de Segur, in a report to Versailles, 'is very agreeable' - Maria Guthrie concurred at the turn of the century.²⁹

Even in the middle of the Second Russo-Turkish War in 1789, as he advanced into Ottoman territory, the Prince found time to order Faleev 'to plough the best fertile ground and prepare enough string beans for sowing next summer. I shall send you the seeds from Jassy. I am going to arrange a school of husbandry here .. .'.³° The planter and builder never rested and never ceased to enjoy creating.

Potemkin's empire within an empire was not confined to New Russia: he also ran the military frontiers of the Caucasus and the Kuban, which were almost permanently at war throughout the 1780s as the Chechens and other moun­tain peoples resisted the Russian advance. The Russian solution was to maintain a line of forts across the Caucasus, manned by military outposts of hardy Cossack settlers. As soon as he came to power in the 1770s, Potemkin reconsidered the defence plans for the Caucasus. He decided to advance the border defences from the old Tsaritsyn Line to the new Azov-Mozdok Line.

The Prince already thought beyond mere guns and towers. The Line, he wrote, 'gives the opportunity to set up vineyards, silk and cotton plantations, to increase stock-breeding, stud-farms, orchards and grain production, joins Azov with Astrakhan Province, and in time of war ... restrains their pressure on our lands'.³¹ The new Line was started in the summer of 1777 with the construction of a series of forts at Ekaterinograd, Georgievsk and Stavropol. The Kabardian, Cherkess and Nogai tribesmen rebelled and were suppressed. In 1780, Potemkin moved the first civilian settlers, often state peasants from the interior, into the towns that were to grow into major provincial centres.[46] When the fortifications were nearly complete in late 1782, the Empress decreed that Potemkin should have 'sole supervision' of assignment of land there.³² The Prince moved Cossacks up to the Line from their settlements on the Volga. When he created the fortress of Vladikafkaz in 1784, he gave it a name that threw down a gauntlet to the tribesmen of the hills: 'Master of the Caucasus'.

The Georgievsk Treaty of 1783 with King Hercules advanced the Russian borders, leap-frogging over the Caucasus to Tiflis. By this time, Potemkin's projects and territories were so vast that he recommended to the Empress that she form a separate viceroyalty for the Caucasus, containing the Caucasus, Astrakhan and Saratov provinces - under his ultimate control of course. The Prince's dynamic cousin Pavel Potemkin was appointed viceroy: after creating the Georgian Military Road over the mountains to Tiflis, he settled state and church peasants to people his new towns. In 1786 alone, 30,307 settlers were available from inside Russia for the Prince to assign to the Caucasus (and to Ekaterinoslav). Pavel Sergeievich was a true Potemkin: he raised Eka­terinograd to be his viceregal capital, holding court there in a splendid palace.³³

Russian advances into the Caucasus provoked an Islamic rebellion among the Chechens, Avars and other tribes: in 1785, a mysterious leader in a green cloak using the name Sheikh Mansour - 'Victor' - emerged from the mountains, preaching the ideals of the Nazshbandi brotherhood of mystical Sufism and declaring a Ghazavat - holy war - against the Russians. No one will ever know who he really was: he was probably a Chechen shepherd named Ushurma, born around 1748, but some said he was an Italian notary's son from Monteferrat named Giovanni Battista Boetti, who ran away to become a Dominican missionary, converted to Islam, studied the Koran in the medressahs of Bokhara and ended as a Moslem warrior. Some Russians did not believe he existed at all: he was just a symbol wrapped in a green cloak.[47] He and his warriors, precursors of the Murids, who, under Shamyl defied Russia in the nineteenth century, managed to eliminate one column of 600 Russian troops, but he was defeated more frequently than he was victorious. Nevertheless, he led his coalition of mountain tribesmen with a daring flair that made him a legend.

The war against Sheikh Mansour was directly run by Pavel Potemkin from Ekaterinograd. But Potemkin's archives show that the Prince ultimately oversaw this perennial war, which kept the Caucasus and Kuban corps in constant action. Before the Russo-Turkish War broke out again in 1787, a defeated Mansour fled to raise the Cherkess in Ottoman territory. When the war began, he was ready to fight again.³⁴ The Russians never permanently suppressed these guerrilla fighters, spending much of the next century fighting the so-called Murid Wars. At the time of writing, this war is still going on.

The Prince also built his own palaces across the south, fit for a viceroy if not a tsar. He had 'the large house' at Kremenchuk, visited by Lady Craven and Francisco de Miranda;³⁵ a vast palace at Khersont with two wings, each with two storeys and a central portico of four storeys, which was the centrepiece of the new city. Then there was the glory of his 'Athens', the monumental Ekaterinoslav^ Palace, designed by Ivan Starov with two wings that extended 120 metres from the portico with six columns reached by two stone staircases: Potemkin's gardener William Gould followed Starov with his hundreds of workers. In Ekaterinoslav, he built an English Garden and two hothouses around the Potemkin Palace to match all its 'practicality and loveliness', as the gardener told the Prince.³⁶

british blackamoors and chechen warriors 293

Oddly, Potemkin did not build for himself on a particularly grand scale in the Crimea, but Starov did build him a now vanished pink marble palace at Karasubazaar.³⁷ His last palace was in Nikolaev.[48] Built when Potemkin was almost becoming an Ottoman sultan, he ordered a Moldavian-Turkish style from local architects - a dome with four towers, like a mosque. Its high, sunny but cool and breezy position above the meeting of the two rivers was scenic. Since it was on the banks of the Ingul river, it had two storeys at the front rising to a third - but one at the back. In his last months, the Prince ordered Starov to add a banya and fountain 'like mine at Tsarskoe Selo'.³⁸ It was Starov's last work for his master, f

The Prince himself always believed that the south was his life's work. In his last days in Petersburg in June 1791, he subjected the British envoy William Fawkener, who never got a word in edgeways, to an exuberant soliloquy that showed he never lost his enthusiasm. Potemkin displayed all the excitement, energy, imagination and arrogance that made him a great imperial statesman. He had to head to the south to continue his great projects, he said, 'the success of all which depended solely on him ...'. There was the fleet he had built almost with his own hands, and 'the population of his Government has increased since his appointment from above 80,000 to above 400,000 fighting men and the whole might amount to nearly a million.. Л³⁹

Before the lies had overpowered the truth, the French Ambassador, Segur, who sent Versailles a report on Potemkin's gargantuan achievements, enthused that 'when he took possession of his immense viceroyalty, there were only 204,000 inhabitants and under his administration the population in merely three years had grown to 800,000. This growth is composed of Greek colonists, Germans, Poles, invalids, retired soldiers and sailors.'

Potemkin increased the estimated population of the Crimea from 52,000 males in 1782 to 130,000 by 1795. In th^e rest of New Russia during the same period, the male population increased from 339,000 in the same period to 554,000, which meant that Potemkin almost managed to double the popu­lation of the Viceroyalty from 391,000 to 684,000 in just over a decade. Another reputable historian estimates that the male population rose from 724,678 in 1787 to 819,731 in 1793. Whatever the true figures, this was an awesome achievement. 'Until the invention of steamships and railroads in the nineteenth century opened up ... distant regions such as the American Middle

West ... to commercial farming, this Russian expansion', writes a modern historian, 'remained unparalleled in scale, scope and rapidity.'⁴⁰

He founded literally hundreds of settlements - 'one Frenchman', recorded Segur, 'told me every year he found new villages established and flourishing in places that had formerly been deserts'⁴¹ - and several big ones. Most still flourish today: Kherson, 355,000 inhabitants; Nikolaev, 1.2 million; Ekaterinoslav (now Dniepropetrovsk), 600,000; Sebastopol, 375,000; Sim­feropol, 358,000; Stravropol, 350,000; Vladikafkaz (capital of North Ossetia), 300,000; and Odessa, 1.1 million. Most still contain shipyards and naval bases.

The construction of Russia's Black Sea Fleet, as well as an oar-propelled flotilla, in less than ten years, was an equally astounding achievement that was to have far-reaching consequences down to the Crimean War and beyond. The effects of the Fleet and of harnessing the immense agricultural power of the steppes resounded and resounds into this century. Russia became a Near Eastern power for the first time. 'The truly enormous achievement', writes a modern historian, 'made Russia ... the arbiter of eastern Europe and allowed Russian might to outstrip Austrian and eclipse Ottoman power.'⁴² But Pot­emkin's love of the south was never just about raw power: there was much romance in it. Sometimes he turned his hand to poetry. As he wrote for the Empress about the foundation of Ekaterinoslav:

Scattered stones of ancient ruins Will answer your divine inspiration In pleasant, brilliant ways They'll create a New Athens.⁴³

ANGLOMANIA: THE BENTHAMS IN RUSSIA AND THE EMPEROR OF GARDENS

My love affair is at an end ... I must certainly quit Petersburg ... So it is lucky that an offer of Prince Potemkin offers me a good opportunity...

Samuel Bentham to his brother, Jeremy Bentham

On ii December 1783, Prince Potemkin summoned to his apartments in Petersburg a young Englishman named Samuel Bentham, whose love affair and now broken heart had been followed by all society like a running soap opera, and offered him a glorious new career. This offer led, not only to the most adventurous life in war and peace ever enjoyed by an Englishman in Russia, but also to a farce in which an ill-sorted company of Welsh and Geordie artisans were settled on a Belorussian estate which they were to develop into Potemkin's own industrial empire. The experiences of Samuel Bentham, soon to be joined on Potemkin's estate by his philosopher brother Jeremy, reveal not just Serenissimus' boundless dyna­mism but the way he used his own estates as the arsenal and marketplace of the state, with no boundary between his own money and that of the Empire.

Samuel Bentham was the youngest of seven children - Jeremy was the eldest - and they were the only two who survived. Their father Jeremiah was a well-connected lawyer whose patron was the future Whig Prime Minister, the original but devious Earl of Shelburne, nicknamed the 'Jesuit of Berkeley Square' by his many enemies. They were a touchingly close family, writing to each other constantly, worrying about Samuel's escapades in Russia. The brothers shared a brilliant intelligence, a driving energy and an outstanding inventiveness, but personally they were opposites: Jeremy, now almost forty, was a shy, scholarly judicialist. Samuel was loquacious, sociable, irritable and amorous. Trained as an engineer but uninhibited by the profession, he was an inventive polymath and entrepreneur. In some ways he shared Potemkin's restless ebullience - he was 'always running from a good scheme to a better ... life passes away and nothing is completed'.¹ In 1780, while Jeremy worked on his judicial reforms in London, Samuel, aged twenty-three, departed on a voyage that took him to the Black Sea coast (where he observed the burgeoning Kherson) and thence to St Petersburg, where he called on Potemkin. He hoped to make his fortune, while Jeremy wanted him to propose his legal ideas to the Empress.² Serenissimus monitored young Bentham's progress. The Englishman realized that the Prince was the man who could put his ideas into practice. Potemkin wanted his help with the Dnieper rapids and his estates and made a vague offer to him soon after meeting him.³ But Samuel wanted to travel so, in 1781, the Prince despatched him on a trip to Siberia to analyse its industries, providing him with a couple of soldiers as guards. On his return, the Prince gave his papers on Mines, Fabricks and Salt-Works⁴ to the Empress.

Potemkin was looking for talented engineers, shipbuilders, entrepreneurs and Englishmen: Samuel was all of these things. Writing to his brother Jeremy from Irkutsk in Siberia, Samuel boasted about his new contact - 'the man in power'.⁵ It was obvious to the excited traveller that he and this anonymous potentate were made for each other:

This man's business is to greater amount than any other's I have heard of in the Empire. His position at Court is also the best on which account, as well as that of his riches, Governors of course bow down to him. His chief affairs lie about the Black Sea. He there farms the duties on some articles, builds ships for the Crown, supplies the army and the Crown in general with all necessaries, has fabricks of various kinds and is clearing the waterfalls of the Dnieper at his own private expense. He was very anxious to have assistance in his undertakings before I left St Petersburg.⁶

However, on his return Bentham was distracted by something much more alluring.

The object of his affections was Countess Sophia Matushkina, pretty niece and ward of Field-Marshal Prince Alexander Golitsyn, the Governor of Petersburg whose failures of command during the Russo-Turkish War were now obscured by the prestige of age. Samuel and the Countess, roughly the same age, met in the Field-Marshal's salon, fell in love and managed to meet twice a week. Their passion was fanned by the operatic intrigues made necessary by the disapproval of old Golitsyn and the interest shown by the whole Court. The Field-Marshal was against any courtship, yet alone mar­riage, between his ward and this English golddigger. The Empress, however, who combined mischief with a certain amorousness herself, let the Court know that she was thoroughly enjoying the scandal.

At this point, Samuel's ambitious imagination ran wild. 'If you have any­thing to say to me for or against a Matrimonial Connection,' he asked Jeremy, 'let me know.' He loved the girl - and her position, for he added disarmingly: 'She is heiress to two Rich People.' Samuel decided his love affair had caused such interest that it would help him get a job from the Empress, a novel sort of curriculum vitae, though one not unknown in Russia: 'I am fully disposed that a desire Her Majesty has to assist my Match goes a great way in disposing her in my favour ... she fully believes it was my Love induced me to offer my Services.' He also wrote letters to Field-Marshal Golitsyn declaring, 'it's already more than five months since I loved your niece'. This can only have further incensed the Field-Marshal, who banned the couple from seeing each other.

The courtiers relished this forbidden romance as much as the Empress - and, even while annexing the Crimea, Potemkin was also kept informed. It was a wonderful moment to be an Englishman in Petersburg and Samuel lived a dizzy social existence, bathing in the attention of magnates and countesses. Petersburg was full of Englishmen - Sir James Harris, and his successor as British envoy Alleyne Fitzherbert, patronized him. His only enemy among them was the permanent Scotsman at court - Dr Rogerson, that accomplished gambler and usually fatal doctor. Perhaps suspecting Bentham's motives, Rogerson told Catherine that Samuel was not worth meeting because he had a speech defect.⁷ This did not hold him back. Samuel's two best Russian friends were on Potemkin's staff, Princess Dashkova's son, Prince Pavel Mikhailovich Dashkov, and Colonel Korsakov, the engineer, both edu­cated in Britain. The Russians took Bentham to the salons of all the magnates who kept open tables for foreigners. Here is a typical undated day in Samuel's social whirl: 'Breakfasted at Fitzherbert, dined by invitation at the Duchess of Kingston's [back on another visit], then to Prince Dashkov's, to Potemkin's but as he was not at home, went to Baroness Stroganov and from there to supper at Dashkov's.'⁸

Probably at Catherine's prompting, her favourite, Lanskoy, now intervened on Samuel's behalf, telling Sophia's aunt and mother that 'the Empress thought they did wrong to oppose the young Countess's inclinations ... This only irritated the aunt more.' There were few cities in the world, even in Italy, as well arranged for intrigue as Petersburg, where the Court itself set the pace and where battalions of servants made the business of sending notes, eaves­dropping and watching for secret signs at windows cheap and comprehensive. So, aided by his friends, Samuel and Sophia enjoyed Romeo and Juliet scenes on balconies in the dim gardens of palaces. Valets and coachmen bore secret letters that were pressed into manicured hands. Countess Sophia let down perfumed epistles to Sam from her windows.⁹ Samuel, intoxicated by the grandeur of those involved in his affairs, suffered from the delusion common to many in love that they are the centre of the known world. He felt the very cabinets of Europe had forgotten wars and treaties, and were exclusively discussing his trysts.

Therefore when Potemkin returned triumphantly with the Crimea and Georgia at his feet, Samuel was convinced that Serenissimus' first question would be about his love. The Prince was much more interested in the Eng­lishman's shipbuilding potential. But he knew from his courtiers that Bentham's affair was doomed. The Empress may have liked teasing the Golitsyns - but she was never going to support an Englishman against the scions of Gedimin of Lithuania. So Lanskoy, imperial intervention manifested in flesh, intervened again: the affair must end.

On 6 December, the crestfallen Samuel called on the Prince, who had Korsakov offer him a job at Kherson. Samuel resisted Potemkin's offer - still hoping Countess Sophia's love would lead to marriage. But it was all over. Petersburg was no longer such fun. Samuel resolved to leave 'out of delicacy' to the pining Countess, so he accepted the job. Potemkin appointed him lieutenant- colonel with a salary of 1,200 roubles a year and 'much more for table money'. The Prince had many plans for young Samuel - he was going to move his dockyards below the bar in the Dnieper and he wanted Samuel to erect his various mechanical inventions 'under his command'.

The fortunate Colonel was now almost in love with Potemkin, like so many Westerners before and after him. It is interesting how Bentham perceived the Prince's unique position: 'his immediate command is all the Southern part of the country and his indirect command is the whole Empire'. The melodramatic lover of the months before was now replaced by Potemkin's self-con­gratulatory protege: 'While I enjoy the share of the Prince's good opinion and confidence which I flatter myself I possess at present, my situation cannot be disagreeable. Everything I propose to him, he accedes to.' When the Prince was interested in someone, he treated him with more respect than all the generals of the empires of Europe put together: now Samuel was that person. 'I go to him at all times. He speaks to me whenever I come into the room giving me the bonjour and makes me sit down when the stars and ribbons may come ten times without his asking them to sit down or even looking at them.'

Potemkin's idiosyncratic management style bemused Colonel Bentham: 'as to what employment I am to have at Kherson or elsewhere ...'. Serenissimus also mentioned 'an Estate on the Borders of Poland ... One day he talks of a new port and dockyard below the Bar, another he talks about my erecting windmills in the Crimea. A month hence I may have a regiment of Hussars and be sent against ... the Chinese and then command a ship of 100 guns.' He was to end up doing almost all of the above. He certainly could not complain that working for Potemkin was going to be boring. However, as to his immediate destiny, he could only inform his brother: 'I can tell you nothing.'

On 10 March 1784, the Prince abruptly departed from Petersburg for the south, leaving Bentham's arrangements to Colonel Popov, his head of Chan­cellery.¹⁰ At midnight on Wednesday, 13 March, Bentham followed in a convoy of seven kibitkas. Samuel kept a diary of these days: he arrived in

Moscow on Saturday to meet Potemkin. When he presented himself to the Prince on Sunday morning in his usual frockcoat, Serenissimus called in ever- ready Popov, told him to list the boy in the army, cavalry or infantry, whichever he liked - he chose the infantry - and put on his lieutenant-colonel's uniform." Henceforth Bentham always wore his green coat with scarlet lapels, scarlet waistcoat with gold lace, and white breeches.¹²

A season of travelling with the Prince round his empire was a privilege accorded to very few foreigners - but Potemkin only tolerated those who were the best company. For six months, Samuel travelled round the Empire 'always in the same carriage' as Potemkin: 'The journey I have been making this spring with the Prince, to me who do not think much of fatigue, has been in every respect highly agreeable ... I had not for a long time spent my time so merrily.'¹³ They headed south via Borodino, Viazma and Smolensk, passed through Potemkin's estates at Orsha on the upper Dnieper, noting that Pot­emkin's leather tannery already employed two tanners from Newcastle. They then headed off to Potemkin's southern headquarters, Kremenchuk. Bentham must have been with the Prince when he inaugurated his new Viceroyalty of Ekaterinoslav. They were in the Crimea by early June: they must have visited the new naval base at Sebastopol together. On the road, Lieutenant-Colonel Bentham experienced the way that Potemkin ran his empire from the back of a speeding sledge that travelled thousands of versts in a spray of ice.

Somewhere in this perambulating horse-powered seat of government, the Prince decided that Lieutenant-Colonel Bentham was not to stay in Kherson. In July, Bentham arrived at his new posting - Krichev. Potemkin's sprawling estate 'on the borders of Poland' was another world, all of its own.¹⁴

Bentham was appointed the sole master of an estate that was 'larger than any county of England' and indeed than many German principalities: Krichev itself was, according to Bentham, over 100 square miles, but it was right next to another Potemkin estate, Dubrovna, which was even larger. At Krichev, there were five townships and 145 hamlets - 14,000 male serfs. Together, the population of these two territories was 'upwards of 40,000 male vassals', as Samuel put it, which meant that the whole number of inhabitants must have been at least double that.¹⁵

The Krichev-Dubrovna estates were not only big but also strategically vital: when Russia annexed these Polish territories in the First Partition of 1772, Catherine gained control of the upper reaches of two of Europe's greatest trading rivers: the right (north) bank of the Dvina that led to Riga on the Baltic and the left or east bank of the Dnieper, on which Potemkin was to build so many of his cities. When Catherine granted lands to Potemkin in 1776, he may have requested estates that happened to have access to both rivers and therefore were potential trading stations with both the Baltic and the Black Sea: ideal for making small ships, Potemkin's lands flanked the north bank of the Dnieper for an awesome fifty miles.

Potemkin was already the master of an industrial empire, best known for its factories making Russia's most beautiful mirrors, a sign of the boom in demand for looking-glasses that literally reflected the eighteenth century's new self-awareness.[49] And then there was Krichev.¹⁶ Bentham found a brandy distillery, factory, tannery, copperworks, textile mill with 172 looms making sailcloth, a rope walk with twenty wheels, supplying Kherson's shipyards, a complex of greenhouses, a pottery, a shipyard and yet another mirror-factory. Krichev was an extension of Kherson. The estate ... furnishes all the principal naval stores in the greatest abundance by a navigable river which ... renders the transport easy to the Black Sea.'¹⁷ The trade went in both directions: there was already a surplus of cordage and sailcloth that was traded on to Constantinople, while there was a booming import-export business to Riga. This was Potemkin's imperial arsenal, his manufacturing and trading head­quarters, his inland shipyard and the chief supplier of his new cities and navy on the Black Sea.

Krichev was another world from the salons of Petersburg, yet alone the chambers of Lincoln's Inn, but it must have been even more of a shock to Bentham's recruits from England. Bentham moved into what was called 'Potemkin's house' but which was really just a 'tottering barn'.¹⁸ The enthu­siastic and arrogant Englishman had landed at one of Europe's crossroads: not only did the riverways converge there, but the place was a cultural cauldron too. 'The situation is picturesque and pleasant, the people ... quiet and patient to the last degree ... industrious or idle and drunken.' There were forty poverty-stricken Polish noblemen who worked on the estate 'almost as slaves'. It teemed with different races and languages.

This was all most confusing and alarming to a newly arrived artisan from Newcastle, who had never travelled before. 'The heterogeneous mixture of people here is surprising,' Beaty, a Geordie heckler, confessed. There were Russians, Germans, Don Cossacks, Polish Jews - and the English. At first 'I thought it a collection of the strangest sounds that ever invaded my English ears.' The Jews, from whom 'we had to buy all the necessities of life', spoke German or Yiddish.¹⁹ Beaty could only muse that 'on a Market Day when I behold such an odd Medley of Faces and Dresses, I have more than once started and wondered what brought me amongst them'.²⁰

Samuel's responsibilities over all these people were equally extensive: firstly he was now the 'Legislator, Judge, Jury and Sheriff of the local serfs. Then, 'I have the direction and putting in order of all the Prince's fabriks here.' The factories were lamentable.²¹ So Bentham offered to take them over. 'Extremely agreeable,' replied Potemkin from Tsarskoe Selo, professing himself 'charmed with your activity and the project of your obliging responsibility'.²²

The Prince was always thinking of improving his cities and warships. Dis­proving his supposed allergy to detail or to seeing his projects through, he turned to the cordage factory: They tell me the cordage ... is scarcely fit for use.'²³ He begged Bentham to improve it and sent him an expert from Kronstadt. When Samuel's friends Korsakov and the sailor Mordvinov, both senior officers of Potemkin's, visited on the way to Kherson, Bentham reported to Serenissimus that he was supplying them with whatever they needed for their shipbuilding.²⁴ After almost two years, Samuel was doing so well with his mills that he sug­gested a deal to the Prince: he would actually take over the less successful fac­tories for ten years while Potemkin kept the profitable ones. All the buildings and materials would be supplied along with 20,000 roubles (about £5,000) of capital, which he would gradually repay. In the deal signed in January 1786, Serenissimus asked for no income whatsoever during the ten years - he simply hoped to receive the factories back in a profitable state at the end. His real interest was not profit but imperial benefit.²⁵

One of Bentham's suggestions was to import potatoes and plant them at Krichev: Potemkin approved. The first twelve acres were sown in 1787 and a 'much pleased' Prince kept growing them on his other estates afterwards. Some histories claim that Potemkin and Bentham brought potatoes to Russia. This is not true - Catherine arranged their import during the 1760s, but the Prince was the first to cultivate them and it was probably thanks to him that they became part of the staple Russian diet.²⁶

Bentham's main task was to build ships for Potemkin - all sorts, any sort at all. T seem to be at liberty to build any kind of ship ... whether for War, Trade or Pleasure.' The Prince wanted gun frigates for the navy, a pleasure frigate for the Empress, barges for the Dnieper trade and ultimately luxury barges for the Empress's long-planned visit to the south. It was a tall if not towering order. There was a priceless moment of Potemkinish exasperation when Bentham tried to pin down the Prince about the ship design. Did Serenissimus want one mast, two masts, and how many guns? 'He told me by way of ending the dispute that there might be twenty masts and one Gun if I pleased. I am a little confused .. Л²⁷ What inventor could want for a more indulgent, and maddening, master?

Soon Samuel realized he needed help. His ships required rowers, whether peasants or soldiers. This was no problem: the Prince delivered, as if by magic, a battalion of Musketeers. 'I give you the command,' wrote Serenissimus from Petersburg in September. Potemkin was always thinking about his beloved navy: 'My intention, sir, is that they shall be capable one day of serving at sea, therefore I exhort you ... to qualify them for it.'²⁸ Bentham naturally had no idea how to command soldiers or speak Russian, so when a major asked for orders on parade, Samuel replied: 'Same as yesterday.' How was this manoeuvre to be conducted? 'As usual,' ordered Bentham.²⁹ There were only 'two or three Sergeants' who could write, yet alone draw, plus the two leather-makers from Newcastle at Orsha, a young mathematician from Strasbourg, a Danish brass-founder and a Scottish watchmaker.³⁰ Samuel bombarded the Prince with requests for artisans: 'I'm finding it very difficult to recruit people of talent,'³¹ he complained in one unpublished letter. The Prince replied that he could hire workmen on whatever terms he liked.

The Prince's obsessional Anglomania now exploded into one of the most energetic recruitment campaigns ever designed to lure British experts to distant climes. Anglophilia ruled Europe.³² In Paris, men sported 'Windsor collars' and plain frockcoats, ladies drank Scotch whisky, took tea while betting on jockeys at the races and playing whist.[50] Potemkin did not care about the details but he knew that he wanted only Englishmen, not only to drive the looms of Krichev but also to run his botanical gardens, dairies, windmills and shipyards from the Crimea to Krichev. The Benthams placed advertisements in English newspapers. These advertisements unconsciously catch the capricious demands of Potemkin. 'The Prince wants to introduce the use of beer,' announced one. Or he 'means to have an elegant dairy' with 'the best of butter and as many kinds of cheese as possible'. Soon the advertisements had expanded to anyone British: 'Any clever people capable of introducing improvements in the Prince's Government might meet with good encouragement,' read one Bentham advertisement in Britain. Finally Potemkin just declared to Samuel that he wished to create a 'whole colony of English' with their own church and privileges.³³ Potemkin's Anglophilia of course extended to his subordinates. Local landowners wanted their peasants trained with English smiths so Dashkov's serfs were sent over to learn English carpentry.³⁴ After Potemkin's future Admiral Mordvinov married Henrietta Cobley, Nikolai Korsakov confessed to Samuel that he too 'was exceedingly desirous of an English wife'.³⁵ Gardeners, sailors and artisans were not enough. The Russians wanted wives too.

Bentham's budget was limitless. When he bothered Serenissimus to fix some bounds on the credit, ' "What is necessary" was the only answer I could get.' Sutherland, Potemkin's banker, simply arranged the credit in London.³⁶ Samuel Bentham immediately saw opportunities for him and his brother Jeremy to trade in goods between England and Russia and to be the middlemen of Potemkin's recruiting campaign. Within weeks of the first advertisements, Samuel was sending Jeremy shopping lists by the dozen: one, for example, demanded a millwright, a windmill expert, a cloth-weaver, barge-or boat- builders, shoemakers, bricklayers, sailors, housekeepers, 'two under-maids, one to understand cheese-making, the other, spinning and knitting.'³⁷

Father and brother, Jeremiah and Jeremy Bentham, enthusiastically scoured

Britain. Old Jeremiah excelled himself - he called on Lord Howe at the Admiralty, then invited Under-Secretary of State Fraser and two recently returned Russian veterans, Sir James Harris and Reginald Pole Carew, to his house to discuss it. He even roped in the former Prime Minister Shelburne, now first Marquess of Lansdowne³⁸ - 'all to procure shipwrights to be sent to my son's assistance'. The Marquess thought Potemkin was interesting but untrustworthy and his compliments about the Bentham brothers were distinctly back-handed: 'Both your sons are too liberal in their temper to adopt a mercantile spirit and your Sam's mind will be more occupied with fresh inventions than with calculating compound interest which the dullest men Russia can perhaps do as well ...', wrote Lansdowne from Weymouth on 21 August 1786. 'He is spending his best years in a changeable country and relying on men of changeable tempers.'³⁹

The whole frantic project now assumes some of the absurdity of an eighteenth- century situation comedy in which a mixed group of philosophers, sailors, phoneys, hussies and workmen are dropped without a word of any foreign language into a multilingual Belorussian village owned by an often invisible but impulsive Serenissimus. Each of these characters turns out to have a completely different agenda to the one assigned by the Benthams.

Jeremy became possessed by a sort of Catherinian graphomania and kept writing to Samuel with interminable superfluous details on a parade of candidates for posts varying from chief of botanical gardens to milkmaid: 'With the respect to the Botanist, I conceive there cannot be the least difficulty in finding a man of science' and then debated the costs of 'The Dairy Lady'. Finally, Jeremy recruited a Logan Henderson to run the said botanical garden. Naturally such an adventurous expedition attracted a motley crew: Hender­son for example was a Scotsman who claimed to be an 'expert' on gardens, steam-engines, sugar-planting and phosphorous fireworks. He signed up, promising also to deliver his two nieces, the Miss Kirtlands, as dairymaids. Dr John Debraw, the ex-apothecary of Addenbrooke's Hospital, Cambridge, and revered author of that significant work, Discoveries on the Sex of Bees (just published to mixed reviews), signed up as Potemkin's experimental chemist along with gardeners, millwrights, hecklers, mostly from Newcastle or Scotland: the first tranche reached Riga in June 1785.

Jeremy Bentham longed to join Samuel in Belorussia: he saw not only mercantile opportunities but peace in which to work on his treatises, and statesmen like Potemkin who could put his utilitarian ideas into practice. (His utilitarian theory measured the success of rulers by their ability to provide the greatest happiness for the greatest number.) Potemkin's estates sounded like a philosopher's dream. Jeremy decided to bring out another group of his recruits. By the time he set off, Samuel was exasperated with his brother's ludicrous letters. Things really deteriorated when the philosopher began to write directly to the Prince himself suggesting quixotic ideas and telling him about gardeners and chemists: Potemkin's archives contain many of these unpublished works of Jeremy Bentham. They are priceless both as historic documents and as works of comic entertainment: the phrase 'mad professor' comes to mind.

Jeremy planned to buy a ship to bear the Prince's artisans, proposing to name it The Prince Potemkin. Then to business: 'Here, Monseigneur, is your Botanist. Here is your milkmaid. The milk is good in Cheshire, county of cheese ...'. Mademoiselle Kirtland, the milkmaid who was also an admirable chemist, stimulated this Benthamite exposition of feminism: 'Knowledgeable women so often lose the perfection of their own sex by acquiring those of ours ... That is scarcely true with Mademoiselle Kirtland.' The philosopher really wanted to sell Potemkin a 'machine de feu' or, even better, the latest steam-engine of Watts and Bolton, explaining that these were mechanisms 'which play by the force of water reduced to vapours in boiling. Of all the machines of modernity ... the easiest to construct is the machine de feu\ but the hardest and costliest was the Watts and Bolton. If the Prince did not want the steam-engine, how about setting up a printing press in the Crimea with a Mr Titler? What would this printing press publish? Jeremy suggested Project of the Body of the Laws by one J. Bentham. Jeremy apologetically signed himself, 'Here for the fourth time, Your Eternal Correspondent'.⁴⁰

Samuel panicked. Serenissimus hated long letters and wanted results. Colonel Bentham feared his career was being ruined by the 'Eternal Cor­respondent' so he told off his bungling brother. The Prince would have found the details 'troublesome' and 'expected to hear no more until the people made their appearance'. Samuel was anxious because Potemkin had not replied: 'I fear the worst ... I hope to lay the blame on your over-zeal.'⁴¹ But the philosopher finally received a courteous letter from the Prince via the Russian Embassy in London. 'Sir,' the Prince wrote to Jeremy, 'I have to thank you for the care you have given yourself in the execution of the Commissions ... on my account. The time did not permit me to come to a resolution sooner ... but now I have to beg you to engage Mr Henderson to accompany the Persons ...'. Indeed, Jeremy Bentham's long but brilliant letters were exactly the sort of fascinating distraction that the Prince relished: he sent word he enjoyed them immensely and was having them translated into Russian.⁴²

Jeremy Bentham was most proud of recruiting a landscape gardener for Krichev named John Ayton, because, as he boasted to his father, 'our Gardener is Nephew to the King's Gardener at Kew'.⁴³ This was a time when there was an aristocracy of gardeners too. Yet Ayton did not become the Prince's star gardener. Potemkin's green-fingered factotum had already arrived in Russia in 1780, at about the same time as Samuel Bentham. His name was William Gould, a protege of Lancelot 'Capability' Brown, the master of the English garden. During the 1770s, Catherine and Potemkin simultaneously became avid devotees of the English garden. In no other field was the Prince's Anglo­mania so marked as in his addiction to creating English gardens wherever he was.

The natural, picturesque (but intricately planned) chaos of the English garden, with its lakes, grottoes, landscaping and ruins, was now gradually vanquishing the formal precise French garden. The fortunes of the gardens followed those of the kingdoms: when Louis XIV dominated Europe, so did French gardens. As France declined and Britain conquered its empire, its gardens also triumphed. 'I adore English gardens,' Catherine told Voltaire, 'with their curved lines, pente-douces, ponds like lakes (archipelagoes on dry land); and I despise deeply straight lines and identical allies ... In a word, anglomania is more important to me than "plantomania".'⁴⁴

The Empress approached her new gardening hobby with her usual level­headed practicality, while Potemkin vaulted it with his typical obsessional singlemindedness. In 1779, the Empress had hired John Bush and his son Joseph to landscape her gardens at Tsarskoe Selo. On her other estates, she hired other green-fingered Englishmen with garden names - Sparrow and Hackett. It was a mark of his Anglomania that Potemkin clearly regarded an English gardener as the equal of a Russian aristocrat: such was his respect for these lords of the flowerbed that he dined at the Bushes' with two of his nieces, one of their husbands Count Skavronsky, and three ambassadors, a social puzzle that alarmed a supposedly more democratic English visitor, Baroness Dimsdale.⁴⁵ She observed that Potemkin relished Bush's 'excellent dinner in the English taste' and ate as much as he could. (Serenissimus so relished English cooking that, when his banker Sutherland gave him roast beef for dinner, he took the rest home with him.) Soon Potemkin's gardening requirements were so great that he recruited Ayton from England and bor­rowed Sparrow from Catherine.⁴⁶

None of these became as famous as Potemkin's Gould, who is still celebrated in distant corners of Russia and Ukraine today: in 1998, this author heard his name in places as far apart as Petersburg and Dneipropetrovsk. Gould was lucky to be recruited by a man described by the Encyclopaedia of Gardening (1822) as 'one of the most extravagant encouragers of our art that modern times can boast'. But Potemkin was also fortunate to find his gar­dening alter ego - the capable and grandiose creator of massive English gardens across the Empire that defied distance and imagination.

Gould employed a staff of 'several hundred assistants' who travelled in Potemkin 's wake.⁴⁷ He planned and executed gardens in Astrakhan, Eka­terinoslav, Nikolaev and the Crimea, including on the estates on the lush Crimean coast at Artek, Massandra and the site of the Alupka Palace.[51] Local cognoscenti still breathe his name with reverence two centuries after he last hoed.⁴⁸ Potemkin discovered the ruins of one of Charles XII's castles, perhaps near Poltava. He not only had it repaired but had Gould surround it with yet more English gardens.

Gould's extraordinary speciality was building English gardens overnight, on the spot, wherever Potemkin stayed. The Encyclopaedia of Gardenings which gave one of Gould's junior gardeners, Call, as its source, claims that wherever Potemkin stopped he would set up a travelling palace and Gould would create an English garden, composed of 'shrubs and trees, divided by gravel walks and ornamented with seats and statues, all carried with his cavalcade'. Most historians have presumed that the stories of Potemkin's instant English gardens were simply legends - it was surely impossible that Gould travelled with a convoy of oak trees, rockeries and shrubberies. But here Legend and Reality merge: the State Archives in Petersburg, which contain Potemkin's accounts, show that Gould constantly travelled with Potemkin to places where we know from other sources that these gardens were indeed laid out in a matter of days. There was something of Haroun al- Rashid about Potemkin. He was, as Elisabeth Vigee Lebrun put it, 'a sort of enchanter such as one reads about in the Arabian Nights.'[52]

Gould now rushed across Russia, working in tandem with the Prince. Gould became 'the [Capability] Brown of Russia' but, warned the Encyclopaedia of Gardenings 'a foreigner established as head gardener to an Emperor becomes a despot like his master'. One senses a gardener's jealousy of one of their kind raised to the level of a tsar of shrubberies, the Potemkin of gardens.⁴⁹

Naturally, Potemkin pursued his Anglomania in painting too. He collected pictures and engravings and was said to own works of Titian, Van Dyck, Poussin, Raphael and da Vinci. The Prince used merchants and Russian ambassadors as his art dealers: 'I've not yet found the landscape painting you wanted, my Prince, but I hope to have it soon,'⁵⁰ wrote the Russian Ambas­sador in the Baroque capital of Saxony, Dresden.

Now Potemkin's English network led him to Sir Joshua Reynolds. When Harris returned to London in 1784, he gave John Joshua Proby, Lord Car- ysfort, a letter of introduction to Potemkin: 'the bearer of this letter is a man of birth - a peer of Ireland'.⁵¹ Carysfort arrived in Petersburg and suggested to both the Empress and the Prince that their collections lacked English works: what about his friend Reynolds? Both agreed. The subjects were left to the artist - but Potemkin wanted something from history which suited Reynolds's taste. Four years later, after many delays, Catherine received one painting and Potemkin two. Carysfort and Reynolds wrote to the Prince in

French as the paintings set off aboard the ship Friendship. Thanking him for his hospitality in Russia, Carysfort explained to Potemkin that Catherine's painting was 'a young Hercules who strangles the Serpent', adding, Tt would be superfluous to remark to Your Highness, who has so perfect a knowledge of Ancient Literature, the story that the Painting has taken from the Odes of Pindar.'[53] Reynolds himself told Potemkin that he was going to do him the same painting, then decided on something else. This turned out to be the The Continence of Scipio. Carysfort also sent him Reynolds's The Nymph whose Belt is Untied by a Cupidon. 'Connoisseurs', wrote Carysfort, 'who have seen it have found it a great beauty.'⁵²

It was indeed a 'great beauty'. Both paintings seem appropriate for Pot­emkin. The Nymph, or Cupid Untying the Zone of Venus as it now called, depicts the lively little Cupid undoing the belt of a glowing, bare-breasted Venus. In the other painting, Scipio, Potemkin's ideal Classical hero - who defeated the Carthaginians as he was defeating the Turks - fights off the temptations of women and money, two things Potemkin could never resist.⁵³ Neither Catherine nor Potemkin was in any hurry to pay: Reynolds charged Carysfort £105 for the Nymph. Catherine paid Reynolds's executors.f Later, Potemkin added a Kneller and a Thomas Jones to his English collection.

Serenissimus also patronized the best English artist in Petersburg, Richard Brompton, a Bohemian 'harum-scarum ingenious sort of painter', according to Jeremy Bentham, whom Catherine rescued from debtor's prison. Potemkin almost became Brompton's agent, even advising him what to charge. He commissioned him to paint Branicka: the splendid full-length canvas, now in the Alupka Palace in the Crimea, catches Sashenka's pert prettiness, her clever haughtiness. Brompton also painted the Empress but, Potemkin personally ordered changes to her hair. Joseph II bought the painting, only to complain that this 'daubing' was 'so horribly painted that I wanted to send it back'.⁵⁴ Brompton often appealed to Potemkin in scrawled unpublished letters that fret about money and imperial patronage.⁵⁵ When he died leaving 5,000 roubles' debts, Potemkin gave his widow 1,000 roubles.⁵⁶

The enthusiasm with which Potemkin and Catherine shared their artistic tastes is another charming aspect of their relationship. When the two of them retired alone for two hours in 1785, the diplomats thought a war had started, until they learned that the couple were happily perusing some Levantine drawings brought by Sir Richard Worsley, an English traveller. Given their shared enjoyment, it was fitting that, after the Prince's demise, his collection joined Catherine's in the Hermitage.⁵⁷

Meanwhile, on 28 July 1785, Jeremy Bentham set out from Brighton, bearing Shelburne's wordly advice: 'get into no intrigues to serve either England or Russia, not even with a handsome lady'.⁵⁸ He met up with Logan Henderson and the two lissom Miss Kirtlands at Paris and travelled on via Nice and Florence (where he spotted a 'poor old gentleman' at the opera - the Young Pretender). The group sailed from Leghorn to Constantinople. Thence Jeremy sent Henderson and the two Miss Kirtlands by sea to the Crimea. He made his own way overland: after a dramatic journey with the sister of the Hospodar of Moldavia and twenty horsemen, he reached Krichev in February 1786.⁵⁹ It was a joyous reunion: the Bentham brothers had not seen each other for five and a half years.

Once the party was complete, the Belorussian village seemed to turn into a Tower of Babel of quarrelling, drinking and wife-swapping. The recruits were as ragged a crew as could be expected, and few were quite what they claimed: Samuel tried to control this 'Newcastle mob - hirelings from that rabble town'.⁶⁰

Jeremy confessed to Samuel that Henderson's milkmaid 'nieces', who had so impressed him with their femininity and knowledge, were neither cheese- makers nor any relation to the gardener: they were apparently troilists. Henderson did not turn out successfully. Potemkin settled the gardener and the two milking 'nieces' in the Tartar house near Karasubazaar. The sen­timental Prince remembered his recovery from fever there in August 1783 and bought it. However, he soon learned that Henderson was a 'shameless impostor' who had not even 'planted a single blade of grass and Mamzel [one of the girls] has not made a single cheese'.⁶¹

Roebuck, another recruit, travelled with his 'soi-disant wife', who turned out to be a thorough slattern. She offered 'her services to either of the Newcastle men', wishing to be rid of her ruffian husband.⁶² Samuel managed to pass her on to Prince Dashkov: these Russian Anglophiles were grateful for a gardener's wench - if she came from the land of Shakespeare. Samuel suspected 'the very quarrelsome' Roebuck of stealing diamonds at Riga - he was 'not the most honest'. When Potemkin summoned Samuel, Jeremy was left in charge, which led to more bad behaviour. Dr Debraw, the bee sexologist, proved an utter nuisance. He stalked into Jeremy's study 'with a countenance of a man out of Bedlam' and demanded a pass to leave. This stew of crooks even stole Samuel's money to pay off their debts.⁶³ There were rebellions against the Benthams led by Benson the general factotum, who again 'like a man let loose from Bedlam' abused Jeremy, who had never seen him before in his life.⁶⁴ Then 'the termagant cook-housekeeper' joined 'the male seducers' by luring 'old Benson' to her bed.⁶⁵ The word 'Bedlam' appeared with ominous and appropriate frequency in the Benthams' letters.

Despite the capers of these expatriates, the Benthams achieved an immense amount, both literary and mercantile: 'The day has an abundance more hours in it at Krichev or rather at our cottage three miles off where I now live,' wrote Jeremy. 'I rise a little before the sun, get breakfast done in less than an hour and do not eat again until eight ... at night.' He was working on his Code of civil law, a French version of the Rationale of Reward and the Defence of Usury. But he had also 'been obliged to go a begging to my brother and borrow an idea ...'. This was the Panopticon - Samuel's solution to supervising this rabble of Russians, Jews and Geordies: a factory constructed so that the manager could see all his workers from one central observation point. Jeremy the legal reformer could immediately see its use in prisons. He worked from dawn till dusk on the Panopticon,⁶⁶

Both Jeremy and Samuel were also pursuing another great ambition that was close to Potemkin's heart: to become landowners in the Crimea. 'We are going to be great farmers,' announced Jeremy. 'I dare say he would give us a good portion of land to both of us if we wish it.. Л⁶⁷ But despite Potemkin's cruelly teasing Samuel - 'you have only to say of which kind'⁶⁸ - the Benthams never became Crimean magnates - though they did get a share in one of Korsakov's estates.

Samuel meanwhile was running the factories, trading with Riga and Kherson in foreign exchange (changing Potemkin's 20,000 roubles for ducats) and English cloth, and building baidaks (riverboats) for the Dnieper. Despite the 'Bedlamite' behaviour of his recruits, he often praised other workers who helped him to achieve so much. In the first two years he had already built two big vessels and eight baidaks; in 1786, he produced an impressive twenty baidaks.⁶⁹ It was all so dramatic and exciting that old Jeremiah Bentham decided he might to come out too. But two Benthams were enough.

In 1786, Potemkin's orders changed. Since 1783, Catherine and Potemkin had been debating when the Empress should inspect her new domains in the south. The trip had always been delayed but now it looked as if it would actually happen. Samuel was already an expert at building barges and baidaks for the Dnieper. Now Potemkin ordered him to produce thirteen yachts and twelve luxury barges in which the Empress could cruise down the Dnieper to Kherson. Samuel had been experimenting with a new invention which he called 'the vermicular', which is best described as 'an oar-propelled articulated floating train, a series of floating boxes cunningly linked together'.⁷⁰ Samuel set to work and managed to fulfil Potemkin's massive order, to which he added an imperial vermicular - a six-section barge, 252 feet long, driven by 120 oars.

Jeremy Bentham, who wanted to meet the famous Potemkin, was waiting for Serenissimus to visit the estate while Samuel was away, testing his ships. Since it seems that most of Russia spent much of this period feverishly anticipating the arrival of the 'Prince of Princes', this was not surprising. Meanwhile, that incongruous British community, the rebellious Belorussian Bedlam, behaved worse than ever now that they were being nervously managed by the phil­osopher of utlitarianism on a part-time basis.

Potemkin had not paid them yet. Dr Debraw, gardener Roebuck and butler- factotum Benson were now in open rebellion. Many of the British clearly enjoyed a traditional expatriate life of abandoned debauchery. Soon they began to perish prolifically, a misfortune that Samuel said had more to do with their intemperate lifestyle than with the unwholesome climate. Debraw had just been made physician-general to the army when he died, possibly a mercy for the Russian soldiers. The rest either expired or were dispersed.⁷¹

'We have been in hourly expectation of the Prince on his way to his Governments for a considerable time ...', wrote Jeremy Bentham, but, as so often, the Prince was always delayed.⁷² A few days later, Potemkin's niece- mistress Countess Skavronskaya stopped at Krichev on her way to Petersburg from Naples and told them that 'the Prince of Princes had given up his intentions of coming'.⁷³ Some biographers have claimed that Potemkin and Jeremy Bentham had long philosophical discussions,⁷⁴ but there is no account of such a meeting. If they had met, it is hard to believe that Jeremy would not have written about it.[54]

Finally, after more than a year in Potemkin's world, Jeremy Bentham departed through Poland, staying in lots of 'Jew inns'. Dirty houses and filthy animals had their consolations: gorgeous Jewesses. Here's a typical entry: 'Pretty Jewess, hogs in the stable ... fowls free in the house.'⁷⁵ The philosopher even managed a singular compliment for a travelling Englishman of his century: one household of Jewesses were so magnificent that 'the whole family, fine flesh and blood, [were] not inferior to English' (author's italics).

The estate flourished: in Krichev, Potemkin had taken advice from his Swiss medical adviser Dr Behr on reducing mortality, possibly by inoculation. The male serf population had risen from 14,000 to 21,000 in just a few years.⁷⁶ Its estate and financial accounts show its importance to the Kherson fleet, while Bentham's unpublished letters in Potemkin's archives reveal how the Black Sea cities used Krichev as their supply yard. In the two years and eight months up to August 1785, Bentham's enterprise sent Kherson rigging, sailcloth and riverboats worth 120,000 roubles and cable and canvas worth 90,000 roubles. In 1786, Bentham delivered 11,000 roubles's worth of baidaks. When Samuel had moved on, its canvas production trebled, its ships' tackle doubled. Many of the factories were highly profitable by 1786: the brandy distillery made 25,000 roubles per annum; the 172 looms made another 25,000 roubles; and the ropewalk produced 1,000 poods or sixteen tons a week, creating maybe 12,000 roubles.⁷⁷ However, profit and loss accounts meant little to Potemkin: his sole criterion was what brought glory and power to the Empire - which meant his army, navy and cities. By this criterion, this imperial arsenal and factory was an outstanding success.

Suddenly, in 1787, the Prince sold the entire complex, for 900,000 roubles, in order to purchase even bigger estates in Poland. He had received the estate for nothing and, though he had invested a lot, it is unlikely that hiring English artisans cost anything close to that. As always with the Machiavellian Prince, there were grand political reasons for the sudden sale of what he had built up so carefully. He moved some of the factories to his estates in Kremenchuk, leaving others to continue under new management. When the estate was sold, Krichev's Jews tried to raise a purse to buy the estate themselves 'to enable Sam[uel Bentham] to buy up this town'. But nothing came of it.

This was the end of the Krichev adventure for Jeremy Bentham and his British recruits. But it was far from the end for Potemkin's two favourite Englishmen - Samuel Bentham and William Gould. Both were to play large roles in his future. The Prince had so far used Sam Bentham as a Siberian mining consultant, factory-manager, shipbuilder, colonel of Musketeers, agronomist and inventor. Now he was to bring his barges up the river on a special mission and then become a quartermaster, artillery expert, fighting naval officer, Siberian instructor and Chinese-Alaskan trader, in that order.

Gould, his team constantly increasing with more experts from England, became an indispensable part of the Prince's entourage - the harbinger of Potemkin himself, arriving with tools, workmen and trees, a few weeks before the great man himself. In the coming war, none of Potemkin's peripatetic headquarters was complete without a Gould garden. But his masterpiece was to be the Winter Garden at the Taurida Palace.

Serenissimus occasionally neglected his British guests because of the necessity of his juggling Petersburg politics with southern enterprise. At the very beginning of Samuel Bentham's adventure, when he was travelling with Potemkin on the way back from the Crimea, Potemkin promised to accom­pany him to Krichev to decide what to do there. They stopped in Kremenchuk, where news reached Potemkin from Petersburg that changed everything.

Without a word of goodbye, the Prince left Kremenchuk with the 'utmost expedition', taking just one servant with him.⁷⁸ Only one person in the world could make Potemkin drop everything like that.

THE WHITE NEGRO

Besides the Empress sometimes liked a boy And had just buried the fair faced Lanskoi

Lord Byron, Don Juan, Canto IX: 47

On 25 June 1784, Lieutenant-General Alexander Lanskoy, Catherine's twenty-six-year-old favourite, died at Tsarskoe Selo with the Empress beside him. His illness was sudden: he had come down with a sore throat less than a week earlier. Lanskoy seemed to know he was going to die - though Catherine tried to dissuade him - and he did so with the quiet dignity he had brought to his awkward position.¹ Yet the most malicious rumours were soon abroad about his demise: he had died 'in place' with Catherine, he had ruined his fragile health by taking dangerous aphrodisiacs to satisfy his nymphomaniacal old mistress. As he died, it was claimed he 'quite literally burst - his belly burst'. Soon after death, 'his legs dropped off. The stench was also insufferable. Those who gave him his coffin ... died.' These were rumours of poisoning: had Potemkin, already blamed for bringing on Prince Orlov's madness by slow poison, killed another rival? Judging by Catherine's tragic account to Grimm and other witnesses, Lanskoy probably died of diphtheria. Thanks to the baking summer and the delay before Catherine could bear to bury him, the stench is only too believable. The innards of unburied corpses do tend to swell in the heat.²

The Empress collapsed in a paroxysm of overpowering grief. Her courtiers had never seen her in such a state. The imperial body-physician Rogerson and minister Bezborodko, gambling and drinking partners, consulted, no doubt in the quick whispers that must have been the background music of Court crises. Rogerson let loose his often fatal laxatives and bleeding, but both men sensed an emotional prescription would heal her better.[55] The Empress naturally thought of her 'husband', her 'dearest friend'. In her desperate unhappiness, she kept asking touchingly if Potemkin had been told. Rogerson informed Bezborodko that it was 'most necessary' to try to calm the Empress's sorrow and anxiety: 'And we know there is just one way to achieve this - the soonest arrival of His Highness.' As soon as Lanskoy was dead, Bezborodko despatched the Court's fastest courier southwards. Catherine inquired like a child if the Prince could be expected soon. Yes, they surely replied, the Prince is on his way.³

The courier found Serenissimus, accompanied by Samuel Bentham, at Kremenchuk in the midst of arranging the foundation of Sebastopol and the management of Krichev. The Prince left immediately. Two indivisible sentiments, as always, dominated his actions: his beloved friend needed him and his power depended on it. Potemkin prided himself on being the swiftest traveller across Russia. If the couriers usually took ten days, Potemkin made it back in seven. On 10 July, he arrived at Tsarskoe Selo.

As Potemkin galloped across the steppes, Catherine had to face the tragic loss of the favourite who had made her happiest. 'Cheerful, honest and gentle' Lanskoy was her beloved pupil, with whom she let her maternal, pedagogic instincts run free, and he had truly become part of the Catherine-Potemkin family. He was strikingly handsome - his portraits show his refined, gamin features. Catherine thought she had found her Holy Grail - a companion for the rest of her life. 'I hope,' she told Grimm just ten days before Lanskoy's sore throat, 'that he'll become the support of my old age.'⁴

Potemkin found the Court paralysed by the prone Empress, haunted by the unburied and decomposing Lanskoy, and infected by a plague of vicious, sniggering lies. Catherine herself was inconsolable. 'I have been plunged into the most acute sorrow and my happiness is no more,' she told Grimm. Lanskoy 'shared my pains and rejoiced in my joys'.⁵ The nobles in both St Petersburg and Tsarskoe Selo became worried by Catherine's emotional collapse. Weeks after the death, courtiers reported that 'the Empress is as afflicted as the first day of M. Lanskoy's death'. Catherine was almost mad with grief, continually asking about her lover's body, perhaps hoping his death would prove a lie. She did not leave her bed for three weeks. When she finally got up, she did not go out. No one saw her for months. There was no entertainment, Court was 'extremely sad'. Catherine became ill. Dr Rogerson bled her and prescribed his usual panaceas, which no doubt explained her wind and weakness. At first, only Potemkin and Bezborodko saw her at all. Later Fyodor Orlov, gentlest of the brothers, called in the evenings. The Prince comforted Catherine by sharing her mourning: it was said the courtiers heard Potemkin and Catherine 'howling' together for the dead favourite.

Catherine felt no one could imagine her suffering. Initially, even Potemkin's sympathy hurt her, but finally his care managed to guide her through the misery and 'thus he awakened us from the sleep of the dead'.⁶ He was there with her, every morning and every night: he must have almost lived with her for those weeks.⁷ Probably this was one of those crises, as Count Cobenzl told Joseph II, when Potemkin returned to his old role as husband and lover.⁸ Their relationship defies the form of modern customs but was closest to the Gallic amite amoureuse. This was not necessarily a time for love-making, but very much for loving. These were the moments when Potemkin achieved 'unbounded power', as he once told Harris:⁹ 'When things go smoothly, my influence is small but when she meets with rubs, she always wants me and then my influence becomes as great as ever.'¹⁰

Gradually Catherine improved: Lanskoy was buried near Tsarskoe Selo in her absence more than a month after his death. Catherine left her summer residence on 5 September, saying she could never return. When she reached the capital, she could not bear to stay in her own apartments, with all their memories of Lanskoy, so she moved into her Hermitage. For almost a year after Lanskoy's death, there was no favourite. Catherine was mourning. Potemkin was with her: in a sense, they were reunited for a while. There was relief when the Empress finally emerged in public: she went to church three days later. This was the first time the Court had seen her for two and a half months.

Potemkin had to return to the south to finish his projects there: he left in January 1785. Even at such a distance, he acted as her comfort. Some of their letters, which probably date from these months, approach the chivalry and playfulness, but not the frantic passion and guffawing laughter, of their affair ten years earlier. There was an autumnal tone to this resurgence of romance as if both felt older. First he sent her a snuff-box and she thanked him for the beautiful thing 'with my whole heart'. Then he sent her a dress made with silk from his southern factories and romantically invited her down the road, 'bespread with silk', to the south.¹¹

Serenissimus returned at the beginning of the summer of 1785, when Catherine was on form again. The two old lovers played their familiar games. 'I'm now on my way to confession. Forgive me, Lady Matushka, for all my sins - either deliberate or unconscious,' wrote Potemkin in old Southern Slavonic script. The Prince had done something mischievous. Catherine replied: 'I equally ask you to forgive me and God bless you. The rest of the aforementioned, I can figure it out all right but I understand nothing or very little. I laughed a lot when I read it.'¹² That was Potemkin: often incomprehensible but always stimulating. Laughter was very much part of her therapy. But she missed his company during his six months in the south.

Catherine's habit of making the favourite into a semi-official position meant that the Court was now so used to it that the courtiers expected the place to be filled. This may have put a strange pressure on her to find someone. A year after Lanskoy's death, Potemkin understood that she, who could not be 'without love for a single hour', needed more permanent love than he could give. If Potemkin was to achieve glory in the Empire, he needed someone to take care of Catherine. When Catherine went to church at this time, young men preened and stood erect in their best uniforms, hoping to be noticed as she passed.¹³ Catherine always found it hard to concentrate in church - as Casanova spotted. This was a distasteful but understandable scene. The men's posing makes clear that candidates for favourite were not fixed by Potemkin, as malicious gossip claimed - they were simply noticed around Court, though a clever patron would place them in the Empress's path.¹⁴ Nonetheless the hunt was on. The disappearance of Lanskoy marked the beginning of the apogee of Catherine's splendour but also of her slide towards indignity. Her loves were never so equal again.

Once Serenissimus was back in the capital, the Empress did notice some of the Guards officers on duty. There was Prince Pavel Dashkov, Bentham's Edinburgh-educated friend and son of Princess Dashkova, and two Guards­men - Alexander Petrovich Yermolov, and Alexander Matveevich Dmitriyev- Mamonov, who was Potemkin's distant cousin. All three served on the Prince's staff. This now became something like an imperial beauty contest, in which the prize would be announced at a masquerade ball.

Catherine had had a soft spot for Dashkov for some time. She regularly inquired about his 'excellent heart'.¹⁵ Five years earlier, Prince Orlov had bumped into Princess Dashkova travelling with her son in Brussels - two semi-exiled Russian magnates. Orlov had teased the self-regarding Princess by suggesting to the boy that he could become favourite. As soon as her son was out of the room, Dashkova subjected Orlov to a prudish tongue-lashing: how dare he speak to a seventeen-year-old boy of such disgusting matters? 'As for favourites,' she concluded, 'I bade him recollect that I neither knew nor acknowledged such persons ...'. Orlov's obscene reply to this grandiosity was 'unworthy of repetition' - but much deserved.¹⁶ Now Orlov was dead, Princess Dashkova had returned from years of travelling and Dashkov was twenty-three.

It is hard to avoid the impression that Princess Dashkova, while regarding favouritism with ill-concealed disdain, could not overcome her ambition for her son to fill that position. Potemkin still made the Empress laugh with his mimicry of top courtiers - but his impersonation of Dashkova's pomposity was his star turn and Catherine often requested it specially. So Serenissimus must have particularly relished hoisting this humbug by her own extremely grand petard.¹⁷

Princess Dashkova called on Potemkin and was most charming. Potemkin evidently encouraged the Princess in her ambitions and mischievously gave her reasons to hope that the Dashkov family was about to be honoured. Between such discussions, Potemkin probably bounded along to Catherine's apartments to give wicked impersonations of the Princess, to gales of imperial laughter. Unbeknown to Dashkova, Catherine was flirting with Yermolov and Mamonov, who were also handsome - but lacked the grisly mother. All had high hopes that their candidate would be chosen, though Potemkin apparently had no preference.

Princess Dashkova, revelling in her resurgent favour, claimed in her

Memoirs that Potemkin sent round his nephew Samoilov at the 'lover's hour' after dinner, 'to inquire whether Prince Dashkov was at home'. He was not. So Samoilov left a message that Potemkin wished to see him at his house as soon as possible. The Princess, writing years later, claimed that Potemkin was offering her son the disgusting post of favourite, which she denounced to Samoilov thus: 'While I love the Empress and dare not oppose her will, I have too much self-respect ... to take part in any affair of such a nature.' If her son did become favourite, she added, the only use she would make of her influence would be to ask for a passport to go abroad.

This dubious anecdote has spawned the myth that Potemkin sent youths over to Catherine at the 'lover's hour'. Since Dashkov was Potemkin's adju­tant, there was nothing sordid in such a summons. It is far more likely that Potemkin was teasing the Princess. No doubt her answer was immediately repeated in his 'Dashkova-voice' to Catherine.¹⁸

Serenissimus held a masquerade at his Anichkov Palace - he never lived in this colossal residence,[56] on the corner of Nevsky Prospect and the Fontanka, but he kept his library there and used it for entertaining. He ordered his architect Starov to construct a third floor and alter the facade to add more of his beloved Doric columns. When Potemkin was low on funds, he repaid his debts to his merchant friend Nikita Shemiakin with the Anichkov. But Cath­erine repurchased it for him. This trading of palaces for debts happened periodically and the Empress always obliged.¹⁹

Two thousand people arrived all evening in costumes and dominoes. He arranged the orchestra, in the Anichkov's huge oval gallery, around a richly decorated pyramid. Over 100 musicians, conducted by Rosetti, played horns and accompanied a choir. The star of the orchestra was a 'silk-clad black­amoor playing a kettle drum' atop the pyramid. A curtain divided the room. Couples danced the quadrille: the courtiers watched Prince Dashkov partner a teenage girl named Princess Ekaterina Bariatinskaya, an outstanding beauty, who was coming out for the first time. She was to be one of Potemkin's last mistresses.

When the Empress arrived with Grand Duke Paul, everyone watched to see if any of the three young men would be favoured. Lev Engelhardt, who kept a graphic account of the evening, noticed Yermolov. Potemkin had ordered his staff to wear light cavalry uniforms, but Yermolov was dressed as a Dragoon, flouting the Prince's command. Engelhardt rushed to warn him to go home and change. 'Don't worry,' replied Yermolov confidently. 'But thanks all the same.' This daring arrogance puzzled Engelhardt.

Princess Dashkova buttonholed Potemkin: together they admired the ath­letic figure of her son, but then she pushed her luck either by presuming her son had been selected or by asking the Prince to propose another of her family. Potemkin turned to her sarcastically in front of everybody. There is no vacancy, he said. The post has just been filled by Lieutenant Yermolov. Who, stammered the humiliated Princess, who?

Potemkin abandoned her, took Yermolov by the hand and walked off into the crowd with him 'as if he was some high nobleman'. The Prince led Yermolov up to the table where the Empress was playing whist and deposited him, as it were, just four steps behind her chair, ahead of the senior courtiers. At that moment, everyone, even Dashkova, realized the Empress had taken a new favourite. The curtain was drawn to reveal the resplendently set table. Empress, Grand Duke and the courtiers sat at a special round table while forty others were laid out for the rest. The ball went on until three.²⁰

The next morning, eleven months after the death of the much mourned Lanskoy, Yermolov moved into his old apartment in the Winter Palace and was nominated adjutant-general to the Empress. He was thirty-one years old, tall, blond, with almond-shaped eyes and a flat nose - Potemkin nicknamed him the 'white negro'. He was neither as decent nor as pretty as Lanskoy, nor as clever as Zavadovsky: 'he's a good boy', noted Cobenzl, 'but quite limited'. Soon promoted to major-general and decorated with the Order of the White Eagle, Yermolov was the nephew of one of Potemkin's friends, Levashov, but equally friendly with Bezborodko. Probably Potemkin was relieved that Catherine had found someone acceptable after that mournful year. Though the simpler historians have repeated Potemkin's jealousy of each favourite, shrewder observers like Cobenzl understood that he was pleased that Yer­molov would prevent the Empress 'from falling into melancholy' and would stimulate her 'natural gaiety'.²¹

The ascension of Yermolov placed Potemkin at the height of his power. When the Prince was ill a few days later. Catherine 'went to see him, forced him to take medicine and took infinite care of his health'.²² But at last Potemkin's position was unchallenged. Court was harmonious. The Prince could return to running his provinces and armies because Catherine the woman was happily settled.

Catherine's Court had reached a height of extravagance and splendour in the mid-i78os: 'a great display of magnificence and state with the great taste and charm of the Court of France', wrote Comte de Damas. 'The splendour of the ceremonial was enhanced by Asiatic luxury.'²³ Catherine and Potemkin both enjoyed holding masquerades, fetes and balls at vast expense: the Empress herself had a taste for transvestite balls. 'I've just had a pleasant idea,' she wrote, earlier in her reign, 'we must hold a ball in the Hermitage ... we must tell the ladies to come less dressed and without paniers and grande parure on their heads ... French comedians will make market stalls and they will sell on credit women's clothes to men and men's clothes to women .. Л²⁴ This was perhaps because the plump Empress knew that she cut a fine figure in male attire.

If one was to meet the Empress of all the Russians at the Court ball during the 1780s, one might find her 'dressed in a purple tissue petticoat and long white tissue sleeves down the wrist and the body open ... of a very elegant dress', sitting 'in a large elbow chair covered with crimson velvet and richly ornamented', surrounded by standing courtiers. The sleeves, skirt and body of the dress were often of different colours. Catherine now always wore these long old Russian gowns with long sleeves. They concealed her corpulence, but they were also much more comfortable than corsets and paniers. Princess Dashkova and Countess Branicka copied her in this dress, but Baroness Dimsdale noted that the other ladies 'wore [it] very much in the French fashion' - though 'French gauzes and flowers were never', decreed Lady Craven, 'intended for Russian beauties'. There were card tables all round; everyone played whist while the Empress toured the room, graciously insisting that no one should stand - which of course they did.²⁵

The Court moved between the Winter and Summer Palaces in St Petersburg during the winter. It followed the same weekly programme - the big gatherings in the Hermitage on Sundays with all the diplomats; Mondays, the ball at the Grand Duke's and so on. When Potemkin was in the capital, he usually spent his Thursday evenings wandering in and out of the Empress's Little Hermitage, where she continued to relax with her lover Yermolov and close friends like Naryshkin and Branicka. Conversation there was private. No servants eavesdropped. At dinner, the guests ordered their food by writing on little slates with a pencil, placing them in the midst of the special mechanical table and sending them down on a dumb waiter, whence came their meals a little later.²⁶

During the summer months, the entire Court travelled the twenty or so miles out to the imperial resorts near by. Catherine loved Peterhof on the Gulf of Finland, but the Court's main home at that time of year was Tsarskoe Selo, where Catherine usually stayed in Elisabeth's Baroque wedding cake, the Catherine Palace, named after the Empress Elisabeth's mother, Peter the Great's peasant-born Empress.

'The place is a magnificent building,' wrote Baroness Dimsdale, 'the brick edifice stuccoed while ... outside pillars all gilded.' Inside, some rooms were simply 'superb'; one in Chinese taste struck her, but she would 'never forget' the little suite 'like an enchanted palace' with 'its sides inlaid with foil red and green so it dazzles one's eyes'. The tapestries in the Lyons room were supposed to have cost 201,250 roubles. Catherine had had the whole place redesigned by her Scottish architect Charles Cameron, and the gardens were of course English, laid out by Mr Bush, with lawns, gravel walks, follies and woods - and a very large lake in the middle. Cameron's Gallery was like an ancient temple, hanging in the light on top of its pillars, giving an impression of lightness and space. Inside was Catherine's gallery of busts including Demosthenes and Plato. The park was filled with monuments and follies to Russia's victories, so that this magical vista was not unlike an imperial version of a Disney theme park, the theme in this case being the aggrandizement of Empress and Empire. There was the Chesme Column, designed by Antonio Rinaldi, rising with impressive dignity out of an island amid the Great Pond, and the Rumiantsev Column dedicated to the Battle of Kagul. There were Siberian, Turkish and Chinese Bridges, a Chinese village, a Ruined Tower, a pyramid and a mausoleum to three of her English greyhounds, engraved: 'Here lies Zemira and the mourning graces ought to throw flowers on her grave. Like Tom, her forefather, and Lady, her mother, she was constant in her loyalties and had only one failing, she was a little short-tempered ...'. Not far away was the mausoleum of Lanskoy. There were even fairground games like the Flying Mountain - a sort of big dipper.²⁷

The Empress rose early there and walked with her greyhounds in her long coat, leather shoes and bonnet, as shown in Borovikovsky's painting and described in Pushkin's novella, The Captain's Daughter. Later in the day, there might be military parades. While Baroness Dimsdale was there, Cath­erine stood on the balcony to review Potemkin leading her Guards.

The Prince had his own houses around Tsarskoe Selo, and the Empress often stayed in them too. Sometimes they built their palaces next door to each other - for example, she constructed Pella next to his Ostrovky so they could easily visit one another. As he based himself in his apartments within the imperial palaces, his many residences were mere caravanserai for this itinerant sultan - but he was constantly acquiring more, building and rebuilding them on a whim or to follow English fashions. The first was the little palace at Eschenbaum on the Finnish coast, 'given to my Prince Potemkin' in 1777, where Catherine stayed when she began her affair with Korsakov. 'What a view from each window,' she exclaimed to Grimm. 'I can see two lakes from mine, three manticules, a field and a wood.'²⁸ This was probably where Harris stayed with Potemkin's family. He had another residence on the Peterhof road,[57] which he bought in 1779: Starov knocked down a Baroque palace there and rebuilt it in neo-Classical style.

However, in the 1780s, Potemkin fell in love with the neo-Gothic style typified in Britain by Walpole's Strawberry Hill. So Starov rebuilt two of his palaces as neo-Gothic castles, Ozerki and Ostrovkyf. Ostrovky had towers and spires, arches and battlements. Only one of the Prince's Gothic castles survives: he owned a large estate in Bablovsky woods adjoining Tsarskoe Selo. In 1782-5, he commissioned Ilya Neyelov (just back from viewing the stately homes of England) to create his own Strawberry Hill. Bablovo[58] was a picturesque, asymmetrical palace with Gothic turrets, towers, arches and arched windows: its two wings extend out from a central circular medieval tower. Through the woods, it looks today like a cross between a ruined church and a magical castle.¹⁹

When it was time for the Court to return to Petersburg, a flunky in a scarlet-trimmed uniform with gold fringe placed a little stool of crimson velvet for the Empress to step into a coach pulled by ten horses. Fifteen coaches followed in its wake. For every one of these journeys, the cavalcade included more than 800 horses. A hundred cannons were fired, trumpets played and crowds cheered. There were palaces on the road to Petersburg where the Empress could rest on the way.³⁰

It was more than ten years since Potemkin and Catherine had fallen in love: Catherine was fifty-seven years old. Everyone in her presence, wrote Damas, was struck by 'the dignity and stateliness of her bearing and the kindness and gentleness of her expression'.³¹ Bentham thought 'her eyes the finest imaginable and her person altogether comely'.³² Her blue eyes and formidably mannish forehead were as striking as ever, but she was small, increasingly fat and constantly tormented by indigestion.³³

Her attitude to power remained the same mixture of ruthless aggrand­izement and raison d'etat combined with a shrewd and utterly disingenuous modesty. When Ligne and Grimm started spreading the name 'Catherine the Great' round the salons, she affected her customary humility: 'Please don't call me the sobriquet Catherine the Great because (i) I don't like any nickname (ii) my name is Catherine II and I don't want people to say of me like Louis XV that they thought me wrongly named .. .'³⁴ (Louis was not very Bien- Aim6 by his death.) Her sole weakness remained her eternal and endearing quest for love. 'It would be better if she had only these loves for the physicality,' wrote a French diplomat, 'but it's rare thing among older people and when their imagination is not dead, they make a hundred times more a fool of themselves than a young man.' From now on, she began to make a fool of herself, as much as an Autocratrix could.

Potemkin knew exactly how to handle her, and she him. By the mid-1780s their relationship depended as much on being apart as being together. The Prince knew 'that it was never in the Empress's vicinity that his power was greatest since then he had to share it with her', explained Damas. 'This was why he latterly preferred to be away from her. When he was at a distance, all details of administration and military affairs were in his hands.'³⁵ Potemkin respected her 'excessive penetration' and ability to spot any inconsistencies in arguments, but he also followed the Disraelian dictum about handling royalty with trowels of flattery. 'Flatter as much as you can,' he advised Harris, 'you cannot have too much unction but flatter her for what she ought to be not for what she is.' He also disloyally criticised her timidity and femininity: 'talk to her passions, to her feelings ... she asks for nothing but praise and compliment, give her that and she will give you the whole force of her Empire'.³⁶ But this was Potemkin playing a role with Harris, perhaps prearranged with Catherine. If flattery had been the key, Harris would have been more successful, and Potemkin less so, because the Prince and the Empress were constantly arguing among themselves.

When he wrote to her, he revealingly called her his 'kormilitsa', his nurse or foster-mother; she still called him 'gosudar' - 'lord' - or used a nickname, but she saw the two of them as Pylades and Orestes, the David and Jonathan of mythology. She behaved as both empress and wife to Potemkin: when he was away she darned his elbows on his jackets like a Hausfrau, sent him endless coats and told him to take his medicines like a child.³⁷ Politically, she regarded him as the essential man of business of her government, her friend - the consort. She constantly told him that 'without you I feel as if I'm without hands', or just begged him to come back to Petersburg to see her. Often she wished he was with her, not in the south, so that they could settle complex matters in 'half an hour'. Her admiration for his inventiveness, intelligence and energy are plain in their letters, and she frequently worries she will do something wrong without him: 'I find myself at a loss as I never am myself when I am with you. I keep fearing I've missed something.'³⁸ Their 'two minds' were ever 'better than one'. She thought he was 'cleverer than I am, everything he's done has been carefully thought out'.³⁹ He could not force her to do things she did not wish to, but they had their own way of coaxing and arguing through problems until they found a solution. Personally, 'he is the only man that the Empress stands in awe of, and she both likes, and fears him.'⁴⁰

She was tolerant of his debauched lifestyle, indulgent of his idiosyncrasies and knew well that he was almost an emperor. 'Prince Potemkin has retired to his place at eleven in the evening under the pretext of going to bed,' she told Grimm on 30 June 1785 from Peterhof, where she stayed with her new lover Yermolov, 'though one knew perfectly well that he is putting together a party of the night' to look at maps and decide state business. 'One's even heard him named more than a king.'⁴¹ She was under no illusions about his unpopularity among some high nobility - but she seemed secretly pleased when her valet told her he was hated by everyone except her.⁴² His disdain for popularity attracted her and his ultimate dependence on her soothed her fear of his power. Indeed she liked to say, 'Even if the whole of Russia rose against the Prince, I'd be with him.'⁴³

When he returned to Petersburg from his trips, he often facilitated her business: Catherine decided that she wished to appoint her tedious co­conspirator, Princess Dashkova, director of the Academy of Sciences. The stately homes of England) to create his own Strawberry Hill. Bablovo[59] was a picturesque, asymmetrical palace with Gothic turrets, towers, arches and arched windows: its two wings extend out from a central circular medieval tower. Through the woods, it looks today like a cross between a ruined church and a magical castle.²⁹

When it was time for the Court to return to Petersburg, a flunky in a scarlet-trimmed uniform with gold fringe placed a little stool of crimson velvet for the Empress to step into a coach pulled by ten horses. Fifteen coaches followed in its wake. For every one of these journeys, the cavalcade included more than 800 horses. A hundred cannons were fired, trumpets played and crowds cheered. There were palaces on the road to Petersburg where the Empress could rest on the way.³°

It was more than ten years since Potemkin and Catherine had fallen in love: Catherine was fifty-seven years old. Everyone in her presence, wrote Damas, was struck by 'the dignity and stateliness of her bearing and the kindness and gentleness of her expression'.³¹ Bentham thought 'her eyes the finest imaginable and her person altogether comely'.³² Her blue eyes and formidably mannish forehead were as striking as ever, but she was small, increasingly fat and constantly tormented by indigestion.³³

Her attitude to power remained the same mixture of ruthless aggrand­izement and raison d'etat combined with a shrewd and utterly disingenuous modesty. When Ligne and Grimm started spreading the name 'Catherine the Great' round the salons, she affected her customary humility: 'Please don't call me the sobriquet Catherine the Great because (i) I don't like any nickname (ii) my name is Catherine II and I don't want people to say of me like Louis XV that they thought me wrongly named .. .'³⁴ (Louis was not very Bien- Агтё by his death.) Her sole weakness remained her eternal and endearing quest for love. 'It would be better if she had only these loves for the physicality,' wrote a French diplomat, 'but it's rare thing among older people and when their imagination is not dead, they make a hundred times more a fool of themselves than a young man.' From now on, she began to make a fool of herself, as much as an Autocratrix could.

Potemkin knew exactly how to handle her, and she him. By the mid-1780s their relationship depended as much on being apart as being together. The Prince knew 'that it was never in the Empress's vicinity that his power was greatest since then he had to share it with her', explained Damas. 'This was why he latterly preferred to be away from her. When he was at a distance, all details of administration and military affairs were in his hands.'³⁵ Potemkin respected her 'excessive penetration' and ability to spot any inconsistencies in arguments, but he also followed the Disraelian dictum about handling royalty with trowels of flattery. 'Flatter as much as you can,' he advised Harris, 'you cannot have too much unction but flatter her for what she ought to be not for what she is.' He also disloyally criticised her timidity and femininity: 'talk to her passions, to her feelings ... she asks for nothing but praise and compliment, give her that and she will give you the whole force of her Empire'.³⁶ But this was Potemkin playing a role with Harris, perhaps prearranged with Catherine. If flattery had been the key, Harris would have been more successful, and Potemkin less so, because the Prince and the Empress were constantly arguing among themselves.

When he wrote to her, he revealingly called her his 'kormilitsa', his nurse or foster-mother; she still called him 'gosudar' - 'lord' - or used a nickname, but she saw the two of them as Pylades and Orestes, the David and Jonathan of mythology. She behaved as both empress and wife to Potemkin: when he was away she darned his elbows on his jackets like a Hausfrau, sent him endless coats and told him to take his medicines like a child.³⁷ Politically, she regarded him as the essential man of business of her government, her friend - the consort. She constantly told him that 'without you I feel as if I'm without hands', or just begged him to come back to Petersburg to see her. Often she wished he was with her, not in the south, so that they could settle complex matters in 'half an hour'. Her admiration for his inventiveness, intelligence and energy are plain in their letters, and she frequently worries she will do something wrong without him: 'I find myself at a loss as I never am myself when I am with you. I keep fearing I've missed something.'³⁸ Their 'two minds' were ever 'better than one'. She thought he was 'cleverer than I am, everything he's done has been carefully thought out'.³⁹ He could not force her to do things she did not wish to, but they had their own way of coaxing and arguing through problems until they found a solution. Personally, 'he is the only man that the Empress stands in awe of, and she both likes, and fears him.'⁴⁰

She was tolerant of his debauched lifestyle, indulgent of his idiosyncrasies and knew well that he was almost an emperor. 'Prince Potemkin has retired to his place at eleven in the evening under the pretext of going to bed,' she told Grimm on 30 June 1785 from Peterhof, where she stayed with her new lover Yermolov, 'though one knew perfectly well that he is putting together a party of the night' to look at maps and decide state business. 'One's even heard him named more than a king.'⁴¹ She was under no illusions about his unpopularity among some high nobility - but she seemed secretly pleased when her valet told her he was hated by everyone except her.⁴² His disdain for popularity attracted her and his ultimate dependence on her soothed her fear of his power. Indeed she liked to say, 'Even if the whole of Russia rose against the Prince, I'd be with him.'⁴³

When he returned to Petersburg from his trips, he often facilitated her business: Catherine decided that she wished to appoint her tedious co­conspirator, Princess Dashkova, director of the Academy of Sciences. The

Princess wrote a letter refusing the job, which she felt was beyond her, and went off to Potemkin's house to explain her refusal, but Potemkin interrupted, 'I have already it from Her Majesty.' Serenissimus read Dashkova's letter and then 'tore it to pieces' in front of her. 'In utter astonishment and rage', Dashkova demanded to know how he dared tear up a letter addressed to the Empress.

'Be composed, Princess,' said he, 'and hearken to me. You are sincerely attached to Her Majesty ... why then will you distress her on a subject that, for these last two days, has occupied her thoughts exclusively and on which she has fixed her heart? If you are inexorable, here is pen, ink, and write your letter anew. But I'm only acting the part of a man devoted to your interests.' Then he added this piece of Potemkinish stroking: the Empress had one other reason for wanting Dashkova in Petersburg. She wanted to be able to talk to her more because, 'to tell the truth, she is worn out with the society of those fools who eternally surround her'. This did the trick. 'My anger', wrote Dashkova,'... subsided.' Serenissimus could be irresistible when he wanted. Naturally, she accepted the post.⁴⁴

As soon as Yermolov had settled into his new quarters, the Empress, accom­panied by the Court, the new favourite, Serenissimus and the ambassadors of Britain, France and Austria, set off on a cruise from Lake Ladoga to the upper Volga. Catherine and Potemkin liked to see things for themselves - as the Empress put it, 'the eye of the master fattens the horse'. This trip neatly shows how the Court entertained themselves - and how Potemkin made policy. The main challenge of Court life was fighting boredom.

The three envoys were paragons of Enlightened wit. The Austrian Ambas­sador remained the hideous, charming womanizer Louis Cobenzl, who, despite being middle-aged, dreamed of the stage and took singing lessons. When imperial couriers arrived from Vienna, they were never surprised to find the Ambassador before his mirror, singing, disguised in full drag as the Countess d'Escarbagnas.⁴⁵ Alleyne Fitzherbert's 'caractere vraiment bri- tannique' meant that he was 'nonplussed by the Prince's habits',⁴⁶ but Pot­emkin found a new friend in the French envoy, who was different from his mediocre predecessors. Round-faced, with his eyebrows always raised, and a permanently amused expression like a smiling marmoset, Louis-Philippe, Comte de Segur, aged thirty-two, was an ornament to the epoch which he recorded so elegantly in his Memoires. Son of a French marshal and war minister, friends with Marie-Antoinette, Diderot and D'Alembert, and a veteran of the American War, he became an intimate member of Catherine and Potemkin's circle.

On the cruise, the courtiers amused themselves with card games, concerts and especially word games. They sound contrived today, but the ambassadors could change their king's relations with Russia by being good at them: for example, Fitzherbert was given the task of creating a poem with lines ending with the words amour; frotte, tambour and garde-note. His reply, combining flattery, French and all four words, was regarded as so brilliant that Catherine repeated it to Grimm:

D'un peuple tres nombreux Catherine est Pamour

Malheur a l'enemi qui contre elle se frotte;

La renomme usa pour elle - son tambour

L'histoire avec plaisir sera - son garde-note.

Some of these ponderous bons mots were invented on the spot, but more usually, like supposedly live comic television shows today, they were labori­ously invented offstage and then delivered in public as if pulled effortlessly out of the air. But Fitzherbert was not the master of these poetic drolleries: he was out-drolled by the 'amiable and witty' Segur, whom Catherine acclaimed as the genius of the genre: 'He makes us poems and songs ... Prince Potemkin has been dying of laughter during the whole trip.'⁴⁷

As the barges sailed down the Volga, Segur witnessed how Potemkin's excitable whims seemed to make instant policy. Joseph II had helped Potemkin annex the Crimea, so Catherine was obliged to back him in his recurring project to exchange the Austrian Netherlands for Bavaria. He had tried it before in 1778, but it had ended in the Potato War with Prussia. Now, once again, Frederick the Great, in his last bow on the stage he had dominated for almost half a century, foiled Joseph's plan to annex Bavaria, by negotiating a League of German Princes to prevent it. It happened that the Anglo-Russian Trade Treaty was up for renewal, but Catherine was now demanding better terms. However, Hanover, of which George III was elector, joined Frederick in his anti-Austrian league. This was no less than a kick in the teeth to Catherine - and even more so to the Anglophile Potemkin.

When this news reached the imperial barge, it sent the couple into a sulk. After dinner, Segur followed Potemkin on to his galley, where Serenissimus exploded, denouncing British egotism for this 'perfidious trick'. 'I've told the Empress long ago but she did not want to believe me.' The new twenty-six- year-old British Prime Minister, William Pitt, 'who doesn't like her personally', was sure to put obstacles in the way of Russian policies in Germany, Poland and Turkey. This analysis of Pitt's eastern approach was accurate. The Prince declared he would give anything to avenge himself on 'perfidious Albion'. What about a Franco-Russian trade treaty, suggested Segur? Potemkin burst out laughing: 'The moment is favourable. Seize it!' Foreigners liked to present the Prince as a capricious child, but actually he was already encouraging Kherson's trade with France, certain Marseilles, not London, was the key to Russia's Black Sea commerce. He immediately recommended that Segur write out a secret draft of a treaty: 'Don't even sign it. You risk nothing ... The other ministers won't know ... Get quickly to work!' Ironically, Segur had to borrow Fitzherbert's writing-desk with which to draft this anti-British ambush.

The next day, Potemkin bounded into Segur's cabin to inform him that, the moment they returned to Petersburg, the Empress would order the treaty signed. Sure enough, when they arrived back on 28 June, Segur was attending a Court masquerade when Bezborodko waddled over and whispered in his ear that he had received the orders to negotiate the treaty at once. It took time but was signed in January 1787.

The credit of Yermolov seemed to rise fast,' noticed Segur on his return to Petersburg. 'The court, astonished at such a change, turned towards the rising sun.' By the spring of 1786, just under a year into Yermolov's tenure, the young favourite had begun to play a dangerous game: he had decided to unseat Potemkin. 'The Prince's friends and relations were in consternation.'⁴⁸ Yermolov remained Potemkin's creature until the Prince caught the favourite's uncle Levashov cheating at cards. Potemkin threw him out and the uncle grumbled to the bumptious Yermolov. It was claimed he refused to forward Serenissimus' requests for favours. But Potemkin could do that perfectly well himself. It is more likely the unintelligent Yermolov was reluctant to be a junior member of the Catherine-Potemkin family, was jealous of the Prince's power - and was manipulated by his rivals.⁴⁹

The invisible hands behind Yermolov's intrigue were probably Alexander Vorontsov, President of the Commerce College and brother of Ambassador to London Simon, and the ex-favourite Zavadovsky, both of whom worked with Potemkin but loathed him. They used Potemkin's distrait finances to suggest that he was embezzling Treasury funds - specifically three million roubles for southern development - but their evidence was a letter from the deposed Crimean Khan, Shagin Giray, who claimed that the Prince was stealing his pension.⁵⁰ This was no evidence, as they well knew, because all Treasury payments, even those to Potemkin, and indeed Shagin Giray, were often years late. This was one reason why it was meaningless to analyse Potemkin's finances, since he used private money for state purposes and then repaid himself when the state funds arrived. Besides, he did not need to embezzle - Catherine granted anything he required. However, the plotters persuaded Yermolov to lay Shagin Giray's letter before the Empress. While the Court was at Tsarskoe Selo, he did so and managed to sow some doubt in her mind. The die was cast.⁵¹

Catherine became cool to Potemkin. The Prince, having done so much to build up the south, was proudly aloof. They barely spoke and he rarely called on her, though his decline was exaggerated. Even in late May, the nadir of this crisis, Catherine said to her new secretary, Alexander Khrapovitsky, 'Prince Potemkin looks like a wolf and is not liked much for that but he has a kind heart ... he would also be the first to ask mercy for his enemy.'⁵² Nonetheless, the courtiers smelled blood. His anterooms emptied. 'Everyone distanced themselves,' recalled Segur. 'As for me, I redoubled my assiduity to the Prince. I saw him every day.' This was not merely friendship on Segur's part, for he had divined that the relationship between Prince and Empress was based on a secret and invisible tie. Nonetheless, the noose appeared to be tightening. Segur begged him to be careful. 'What - you too!' replied Potemkin. 'You wish me to beg shamefully after such great services rendered under the whim of an offensive injustice? I know they say I'm lost but they're wrong. Let me reassure you - a mere child won't overthrow me!'

'Be careful!', warned Segur again.

'Your friendship touches me,' said the Prince. 'But I disdain my enemies too much to fear them.'⁵³

On 17 June, the Empress, Grand Duke, Potemkin, Yermolov and Segur left Tsarskoe Selo for Pella. The next day, she visited Potemkin's neighbouring palace at Ostrovky, more evidence that Potemkin's true position was not nearly as disastrous as gossip suggested. On their return to Tsarskoe Selo, Potemkin attended all Catherine's dinners for the next three days. Presumably, the conspirators were now pushing Catherine to act on their evidence. Even in the sunny Catherine Palace, Potemkin was being cold-shouldered.

The next day, he simply left Court without a word and travelled towards Narva on the Baltic. He established himself back in the capital at the palace of the Master of Horse, Naryshkin, occupying himself with 'parties, pleasure and love'. Potemkin's 'enemies sang victory'. Catherine presumably was used to his sulks and did nothing. But when he did not appear on 28 June - Catherine's Accession Day - she surely realized that the masterful politician was calling her bluff.

'I am very anxious if you are well?', Catherine wrote secretly to Potemkin, answering his challenge. 'I haven't heard a word from you for so many days.'⁵⁴ The letter was warm. It was one of those signs that he understood perfectly. Potemkin waited a few days.

Then he suddenly appeared at Court - a Banquo's ghost who turned out not to be a ghost at all. The Prince supposedly stormed directly into the Empress's boudoir in 'a fury'⁵⁵ and shouted something like this: 'I come, Madame, to declare to Your Majesty that Your Majesty must this instant choose between Yermolov and me - one of us must this very day quit your Court. As long as you keep that White Negro, I will not set my foot within the Palace.'⁵⁶ Then he stormed out again and left Tsarskoe Selo.

On 15 July, the Empress dismissed Yermolov through one of his puppet- masters, Zavadovsky. The White Negro departed the next day, burdened with 4,000 peasants, 130,000 roubles and an order to travel.[60] That very evening, the other young officer with whom Catherine had flirted with a year earlier, Alexander Dmitriyev-Mamonov, arrived with Potemkin. Mamonov was his adjutant (and distant kinsman). Potemkin is said to have sent Mamonov to Catherine bearing a watercolour, with the saucy question, what did she think of the picture? She viewed his looks and replied: 'The contours are fine but the choice of colours less fortunate.' This is a legend, but it does sound like one of the games that Potemkin alone could play with the Empress. The next day, the Empress wrote to Mamonov...

That night, Mamonov passed his friend Khrapovitsky, the Empress's sec­retary, as he was escorted into Catherine's bedchamber - either an awkward or a triumphant moment to meet a close friend. It was indeed a very small world which the diarist Khrapovitsky recorded in fascinating detail. Next morning, the punctilious secretary noted archly: 'They s[lep]t until nine o'clock' - in other words, the Empress spent an extra three hours in bed. Next day, 'they closed the door. M-v was there at dinner and according to custom - [she was] powdered', according to Khrapovitsky, whose eyes almost never leave the imperial keyhole.⁵⁷

The handover to Mamonov was so seamless that it is quite possible that Potemkin's 'fury' had been much earlier and that the crisis was never about embezzlement at all but about Yermolov himself. It is likely that Catherine was romancing Mamonov while Yermolov and his plotters were singing with victory. This explains Potemkin's unusual absence of nerves about the conspiracy - another example of his play-acting. Potemkin threatened, at one time or another, to have every one of the favourites dismissed, from Zav­adovsky onwards. Usually Catherine reassured him that his power was secure - so he should mind his own business. She forced the favourites to flatter him, while he was flexible enough to befriend them and work with them. He succeeded in deposing Yermolov probably because that minion refused to live within Potemkin's system - and because Catherine did not really love him. However arranged, it was a political victory.

'Matuskha having walked around Petersburg, Peterhof, Oranienbaum, I've returned and I kiss your feet. I've brought Paracletes safe, healthy, merry and lovable.' Paracletes - matushka's little helper, Mamonov - was already with the Empress, who replied, 'It's a great joy, batinka: how are you feeling without any sleep, my lord? How glad I am you've arrived!'⁵⁸

'Prince Grigory Alexandrovich has returned,' wrote Khrapovitsky on 2.0 July. Mamonov gratefully presented the Prince with a golden teapot engraved 'More united by heart than by blood', because they were such distant rela­tions.⁵⁹ Mamonov, aged twenty-six, was an educated Francophile from the middling gentry, with an exquisite rosebud mouth and tidy little nose. He was much more cultured and intelligent than Yermolov and widely liked for his charm, looks and courtesy. Catherine showered him with honours: the Adjutant-General was made a count of the Holy Roman Empire and he soon owned 27,000 serfs while receiving 180,000 roubles a year with a table budget of 36,000 roubles. Did she feel she had to compensate her lovers more for her own ageing? Catherine fell in love with him and was soon raving about him. She nicknamed him 'Mister Redcoat', because he liked to wear one that went well with his black eyes. 'The red coat', she exulted to Grimm on 17 December, 'covers a man with an excellent heart ... the wit of four people ... an inexhaustible well of merriment.' Mamonov made Catherine happy and Potemkin secure. He became a member of their unusual family, like Lanskoy, helping the nieces Branicka and Skavronskaya,⁶⁰ and writing warm letters to the Prince, which Catherine enclosed with her own. Sometimes she added postscripts to Mamonov's letters, which he usually signed 'with absolute devotion'.⁶¹

Soon after the fall of the White Negro and the installation of Mister Redcoat, Potemkin invited Segur for dinner. 'Well Monsieur Diplomat,' the Prince greeted him, 'at least in this case ... my predictions are better than yours!' Then, embracing his friend warmly, Potemkin boomed: 'Was I mis­taken in anything, batushka? Did the child overthrow me? Did my bravery sink me?'⁶²

His bravery had indeed paid off handsomely. Serenissimus could return to the south. He was away so much that Colonel Mikhail Garnovsky, his hotnme d'affaires in Petersburg who made a fortune out of the Duchess of Kingston, sent him secret reports on the politics of the Court. Garnovsky particularly monitored the behaviour of the favourite and noticed that, when toasts were drunk, he carefully drank only to the Prince. Catherine showed state papers to Mamonov, but he was no statesman. Potemkin's enemies Alexander Vorontsov and Zavadovsky courted him, hoping he would do a Yermolov. He remained loyal but he suffered. He was jealous if Catherine paid attention to anyone else, but found Court life lonely and cruel: he was right when he said the courtiers were like 'wolves in a forest'.⁶³

Catherine and Potemkin decided the time had come for her to inspect his achievements in the south and demonstrate Russia's undying commitment to controlling the Black Sea. The date kept changing, but finally they agreed that she would visit Kherson and Crimea in the summer of 1787. On the eve of Catherine's departure on this remarkable and glorious expedition, Serenissimus was now at the height of his power, exercising, 'in Russia, a power greater than ... Wolsey, Olivares and Richelieu',⁶⁴ wrote one foreigner. For years, diplomats described him as 'Grand Vizier',⁶⁵ others called him 'Prime Minister',⁶⁶ but none of these quite caught his unique position. Saint- Jean was closest to the reality: 'People realized they could not overthrow Potemkin ... He was tsar in all but name.'⁶⁷ But was he happy? How did he live? Who was Potemkin the man?

A DAY IN THE LIFE OF GRIGORY ALEXANDROVICH

Tis you, the bravest of all mortals! Mind fertile with a host of schemes! You did not tread the usual paths But did extend them - and the roar You left behind to your descendants. Tis you, Potemkin, wondrous leader!

Gavrili Derzhavin, The Waterfall

Morning

The Prince woke late when he resided at the 'Shepilev house', linked by its covered passageway to the Empress's apartments in the Winter Palace. The anterooms were already crowded with dignitaries. He received favoured ones lying in bed in his dressing gown. When he arose, he liked to have a cool bath followed by a short morning prayer. His breakfast was usually hot chocolate and a glass of liqueur.

If he decided to hold a large audience, he reclined in his reception room, studiously ignoring the keenest sycophants. But they were in trouble if they ignored him. One young secretary, educated at both Cambridge and Oxford, was waiting to see the Prince with a briefcase of papers among all the generals and ambassadors. They sat in sepulchral silence because everyone knew the Prince was still asleep. 'Suddenly the door of the bedroom ... was loudly opened and the huge Potemkin appeared on his own in a dressing gown, calling for his valet. Before he even had time to call, in a sudden moment, everyone in the hall - generals and noblemen - competing in their speed, rushed headlong out of the room to find the Prince's valet...'. Since everyone else had scampered off, the secretary remained frozen there in Potemkin's presence, 'not even daring to blink'.

Serenissimus gave him a menacing glance and strode off. When he reap­peared in full uniform. Potemkin called him over: 'Tell me, Alekseev, do you know how many nut-trees there are in my Taurida Palace garden?' Alekseev did not know. 'Go to my garden, count them and report to me,' ordered the

Prince. By nightfall, the youngster returned and gave the Prince the number. 'Good. You fulfilled my order quickly and well. Do you know why you were given such an order? To teach you to be more prompt because I noted this morning, when I cried for my valet and generals and noblemen rushed to find him, you didn't move, you greenhorn ... Come tomorrow with your papers because today I am not disposed to examine them. Goodbye!'¹

The petitioners were puzzled by the looks and character of this Prince - he was unpredictable, fascinating, alarming. He exuded both menace and welcome: he could be 'frightening',² crushingly arrogant, wittily mischievous, warm and kind, manic and morose. When Alexander Ribeaupierre was eight, he was taken to see Potemkin and never forgot his animalistic power and affectionate gentleness: 'I was terrified when he lifted me up in his mighty hands. He was immensely tall. I can see him now in my mind's eye wearing his loose dressing gown with his hairy chest naked.'³ Ligne said he was 'tall, erect, proud, handsome, noble, majestic or fascinating', while others described him as a hideous Cyclops. Yet Catherine constantly talked of his hand­someness and he was amply endowed with 'sex appeal', to judge by the female letters that fill his archive.⁴ He was undeniably vain about his fame, but shy about his appearance, particularly his one eye. When someone sent him a courier with one eye, Serenissimus immediately suspected that they were trying to make fun of him and was deeply hurt by this 'ill-judged wit' - this when he was the most powerful man east of Vienna.⁵ That is the reason there are so few portraits of him.

'Prince Potemkin has never consented to be painted,' Catherine explained to Grimm, 'and if there exists any portrait or silhouette of him, it is against his wish.'⁶ She persuaded him around 1784 and again in 1791 to sit for Giambattista Lampi, the only artist he trusted.⁷ But Serenissimus, ever shy of his eye, would only sit three-quarter face - even though his useless, half-closed eye was not particularly repulsive.[61] Foreigners thought his eyes represented Russia, 'the one open and the other closed, [which] reminded us of the Euxine [Black Sea] always open and the Northern Ocean so long shut up with ice'. Lampi's portrait of him as Grand Admiral, bestriding the Black Sea, is the dynamic Potemkin that history has ignored. Lampi's later paintings show the fuller, older face.⁸ But the best is the unfinished portrait of the Prince in his mid-forties - the long, artistic face, full lips, dimpled chin, thick auburn hair. By the late 1780s, his immense girth matched his giant stature.

The Prince dominated every scene he graced. 'Potemkin created, destroyed or confused, yet animated, everything,' wrote Masson. 'The nobles who detested him seemed at his glance to sink into nothing.'⁹ Virtually everyone who ever met him used the words 'extraordinary', 'astonishing', 'colossus', 'original' and 'genius' - but even those who knew him well found it hard to describe him. There was and is no way to categorize Potemkin except as one of history's most exhilarating originals. That was, after all, how Catherine saw him. Yet the best observers are agreed only that he was 'remarkable' - simply a phenomenon of nature. 'One of the most extra­ordinary men, as difficult to define as rare to encounter,' thought the Due de Richelieu. He remains, as Lewis Littlepage of Virginia wrote, 'that indescribable man'.¹⁰

Everything about the Prince was a study of the wildest contrasts: he was a living chiaroscuro - 'an inconceivable mixture of grandeur and pettiness, laziness and activity, bravery and timidity, ambition and insouciance', wrote Segur. Sometimes he showed the 'genius of an eagle', sometimes 'the fickleness of a child'. He was 'colossal like Russia'. In his mind, 'there were cultivated districts and deserts, the roughness of the eleventh century and the corruption of the eighteenth, the glitter of the arts and the ignorance of the cloisters'.¹¹ On the one hand he was 'bored with what he possessed', on the other, he was 'envious of what he could not obtain'. Potemkin 'wanted everything but was disgusted by everything.' His lust for power, wanton extravagance and towering arrogance were always made bearable by his exuberant brilliance, Puckish humour, caressing kindness, generous humanity and absence of malice. Richelieu saw that 'his nature always carried him more towards Good than Bad'.¹¹ The fame of the Empire was increased by his conquests - but he knew, as Segur predicted, that 'the admiration they excited' was for Catherine and 'the hatred they raised' was for him.¹³

Everything had to be complicated with Potemkin.¹⁴ His eccentricities may have irritated the Empress, but overall, Segur noticed, they made him far more interesting to her. Richelieu thought him a man of 'superiority' but 'an astonishing confection of absurdity and genius'.¹⁵ 'At times,' observed Littlepage, 'he appeared worthy of ruling the Empire of Russia, at times scarcely worthy of being an office clerk in the Empire of Lilliput.'¹⁶ But the most striking feature of all his eccentricities - and the one we must never forget - is that he somehow found the time and energy to conduct colossal amounts of work and almost achieve the impossible.

The petitioners waiting his attention were accustomed to hearing the Prince's orchestra. He liked to begin the day with music, so he would order his ever present musicians and one of his collection of choirs to perform for him. They also played during dinner at i p.m. and had to be ready at 6 p.m. to play wherever the Prince appeared - and they travelled with him whether he was in the Crimea or at war. Music was intensely important to him - he wrote it himself and it soothed him. Potemkin had to have music wherever he went and he often sang to himself.

He managed the musical entertainment at Court because the Empress happily admitted to being tone-deaf. 'Sard, Marchese the singer and Madame Todi were the delight not of the Empress whose ear was insensible to har­mony,' Segur remembered of one concert, 'but of Prince Potemkin and a few enlightened music lovers .. Л¹⁷ He paid 40,000 roubles for the Razumovskys' orchestra. But his musical passion really took off when he hired the celebrated Italian composer-conductor Giuseppe Sarti in 1784. The orchestra itself, between sixty and a hundred musicians, played 'that extraordinary music', recalled Lady Craven, 'performed by men and boys, each blowing a straight horn, adapted to his size. 65 of these musicians produce a very harmonious melody, something like an immense organ.'¹⁸ Potemkin made Sarti his first director of music at the unbuilt Ekaterinoslav University. His expenses show him importing horns and paying for carriages to take 'Italian musicians Conti and Dophin' to the south. There Potemkin gave Sarti and three of his musicians 15,000 desyatins of land: 'I grant the village ... for the four musicians ... Be happy and tranquil in our country.' Thus Potemkin settled what was surely history's first musical colony.¹⁹

Potemkin and his circle were continually sending each other opera scores, as music lovers today give each other new CDs. Catherine enjoyed Potemkin sending music to her friend Grimm, who called him 'my benefactor in music'.²⁰ Music was a way to curry favour. Prince Lubomirski, a Polish magnate whose estates provided Potemkin's timber, frequently sent him horn music: 'If this genre of music is to the taste of Your Highness, I will take the liberty of following it with another.'²¹ The Austrians used music as a diplomatic weapon. When Cobenzl, himself an opera fanatic, was at home in Vienna, he reported to Potemkin: 'We've heard the details of the charming show' of Sarti and Marchesini in Petersburg. The opera in Vienna could not equal it, the envoy claimed tactfully. Later, when the war began, Kaiser Joseph thought it worth while to send Cobenzl 'two choral pieces for Prince Potemkin's orchestra'.²² Just as Russian ambassadors found his art deals and did his shopping, so they also were always looking for new musicians for him.²³

Serenissimus took a personal pride in Sard's work, especially since he wrote parts of it himself. He had always written love songs, like the one to Catherine, and religious music, like the 'Cannon to our Saviour', published by his own printing press. It is hard to judge the quality of Potemkin's composition but, since his critics did not mock his music, he was probably talented, as Frederick the Great was with his flute. Indeed, Miranda, Potemkin's cynical travelling guest and a just witness, was impressed by his musical talents. He met Sarti in the south and watched Potemkin 'writing scores here and there, then gave them back to Sarti indicating the tone, rhythm and melody of the two points composition written on the spur of the moment, which gives some idea of his fecundity and great skill'. Sarti presumably then took Potemkin's ideas and arranged them for the orchestra.²⁴

Certainly Catherine was proud of his musical abilities. 'I can send you the tune of Sarti,' she wrote to Grimm, 'composed on the notes put to­gether haphazardly by Prince Potemkin.' The Prince, who always wanted an immediate reaction, 4s very impatient to know if all the music has been delivered to you'.²⁵ Sarti and his itinerant hornblowers were with Potemkin to the end, but later he was also offered the greatest musical genius of his time - Mozart.

At about ii a.m., the ritual moment arrived that defined Potemkin's mys­terious power. The Prince was 'receiving all the great nobles at his lever., wearing their decorations', recalled the Comte de Damas, 'while he sat in the middle of the circle with his hair unbound and a great dressing gown around him with no britches underneath.' In the midst of this Asiatic scene, the Empress's valet de chambre appeared and whispered in the Prince's ear: 'he quickly wrapped his dressing gown more closely round him, dismissed everyone with a bow of farewell, and, disappearing through the door that led to the privy apartments, presented himself to the Empress'.²⁶ She had already been awake for about five hours.

He might then decide to get dressed - or not. Potemkin adored shocking everyone, thought Ligne, so he affected 'the most attractive or the most repulsive manners'. He enjoyed dressing up and down. On formal occasions, no one was more richly clothed than Potemkin, who adopted 'the style and manners of a grand seigneur at Louis XIV's court'. When he died, the clothes in his palace were listed: there were epaulettes set with rubies worth 40,000 roubles and diamond buttons worth 62,000 roubles, and he always wore his diamond-set portrait of the Empress worth 31,000 roubles. He had a hat so heavy with jewels that only an adjutant could bear it, worth 40,000 roubles. Even the garters for his stockings were worth 5,000 roubles. His full-dress wardrobe was worth 276,000-283,000 roubles. Yet he was often seen 'hair loose, in dressing gown and pantaloons, lying on a sofa'. He also favoured furs - the Prince was 'unable to exist without furs; always without drawers in his shirt - or in rich regimentals embroidered on all the seams'.²⁷ Foreigners implied that a man in a dressing gown was obviously not working, but this was not so: wearing wraps or regimentals, Potemkin usually worked extremely hard.

When Segur arrived in Petersburg, Serenissimus appalled the French Ambassador by receiving him in his fur wrap. So Segur invited Potemkin to dinner and Segur greeted him in the same garb, which the Prince enjoyed immensely - though only a friend of Marie-Antoinette could have got away with it. There was political method in this sartorial madness: at a time when the ritual of Catherine's Court was getting richer, more stratified, the courtiers competed to follow etiquette while dressing as ostentatiously as possible. Catherine's favourites were always keenest to display their prosperity and power in lace, feathers and diamonds. Favourites used dress to symbolize their affluence and influence.²⁸ Potemkin's shaggy furs announced that he was no mere favourite. It emphasized his superiority: he was above the Court. He was the imperial consort.

The Prince had now been up for a few hours, reviewing papers with Popov, receiving petitioners and meeting the Empress. But there were days when he was too depressed to get out of bed at all. Once he summoned Segur to his bedroom, explaining that 'depression had prevented him from getting up or dressing .. Л Harris believed that his illnesses arose solely from 'his singular manner of living'.²⁹ Serenissimus certainly lived on his nerves. The life of a favourite, let alone a secret consort, was extremely stressful, for he was the man to destroy and he had to defend himself against all comers.[62] The work of a chief minister, in an era when states were expanding so fast, but the bureaucracies had not caught up, was debilitating - no wonder leaders like Pitt and Potemkin died at the ages of forty-six and fifty-two.³⁰

Potemkin had to be doing something with his hands and mouth, so he was either 'gnawing his nails or apples and turnips'. He even bit his nails in the company of monarchs, a winning trait.³¹ But he overdid it and often suffered from infected hangnail. Catherine saw it as just another part of his unique charm.³² When Grand Duke Alexander was born, the Empress joked that 'he chewed his nails just like Prince Potemkin'.³³

His moods were ever changing - from 'distrust, to confidence, to jealousy or to gratitude, to ill-humour or pleasantness', recalled Ligne. Crises or bursts of work were usually followed by bouts of illness, which afflicted other politicians such as Sir Robert Walpole, whose feverish attacks always struck after anxiety was eased by success. These were partly the result of the malarial fevers he contracted in 1772 and 1783. The exhaustion of travelling vast distances at high speed, along with tireless inspections, political tension, heat and cold, and bad water, was enough to make anyone ill: indeed the other most widely and swiftly travelled Russian leader, Peter the Great, whom Potemkin in some ways resembled, was constantly ill with fevers on his journeys. The Prince's need to bestride Russia made his life much harder because he almost literally had to be in two places at once.

His temperament was abnormally turbulent, swinging from wild exuber­ance to the depths of depression in moments. 'On some occasions, he was insouciant to the point of immobility and on others capable of putting forth incredible exertions.' When he was depressed, he brooded silently and often felt desperate, even frantic. Twenty adjutants were summoned, then he would not speak to them. Sometimes he did not speak for hours. 'I sat next to Prince Potemkin at dinner,' wrote Lady Craven, 'but except for asking me to eat and drink, I cannot say I heard the sound of his voice.'³⁴

He may have been cyclothymic, even manic-depressive, swerving between lows of depression, inactivity and despair on one hand, and hypomania, a whirl of energy, elation and activity, on the other. He was frequently described as manic, and his euphoria, intense loquacity, insomnia, wild spending of money and hypersexuality were all characteristics of cyclothymic behaviour. But so was 'the intense creativity' that enabled him to do several things at once and, during his periods of activity, to do much more than a normal person could. His excessive optimism was often self-fulfilling. It also contributed to the aura of seductiveness and sexual enjoyment that made him so attractive. Such characters are difficult to live with - but are often talented.* They sometimes possess outstanding powers of leadership, precisely because they suffer from this manic condition.³⁵

People who knew Potemkin admired his 'agile imagination' but attacked his fickleness. 'Nobody thought out a plan more swiftly, carried it out more slowly and abandoned it more easily,'³⁶ said Segur, an attitude that is disproved by the scale of his actual achievements. But that was certainly the impression Potemkin gave. Ligne was nearer than truth when he said Serenissimus 'looks idle and is always busy'.

He was quite capable of doing many things at once: when Segur visited him to help the French merchant Antoine in Kherson, he told the diplomat to read his memorandum aloud. But Segur was 'greatly surprised to see the Prince beckon into the room one after another, and give orders to a priest, an embroiderer, a secretary and a milliner'. The Frenchman was annoyed. Potemkin 'smiled and said he had heard everything quite well'. Segur was not convinced, until three weeks later Antoine wrote from Kherson to say that every request had been fulfilled by the Prince. Segur went round to Potemkin's to apologize: 'As soon as he caught sight of me he flung his arms open and came towards me saying, "Well batushka did I not listen to you? ... Do you still think I can't do several things simultaneously and are you still going to be put out with me?' "³⁷ But he worked when he wanted and if he wanted.

If he was in a state of depressive collapse or just relaxing, no papers were signed and part of Russian government came to a halt. The secretaries in his Chancellery were frustrated, so one bright spark, who was nicknamed 'the Hen', probably for his busy-body bustle, boasted he could get them signed. Finding the Prince, the Hen explained how necessary it was to sign the papers. 'Ah! You've come to the point. I have free time' - and Potemkin tenderly took the boy to his study and signed everything. The secretary boasted of his achievement back in the Chancellery. But when the office began to process the papers, the unfortunate official discovered that Potemkin had signed every one, 'Cock, Cockerel, Hen.'³⁸ He could be shamelessly childish.

Every day, he studiously ignored and disdained the many of the princes,

* Oliver Cromwell, the Duke of Marlborough and Clive of India are among the many gifted leaders who are said to have displayed cyclothymic traits.

generals and ambassadors who crowded his anterooms to win his favour. Lying half naked and fur-wrapped on his divan, he might summon one of them with his finger.³⁹ Diplomats so feared being made to look silly that they hid in their carriages outside the Palace and sent in their underlings to wait until Potemkin deigned to receive them.⁴⁰

Serenissimus would not tolerate sycophancy and devised appropriate pun­ishments to tease those who practised it, but he respected and rewarded courage. 'I'm bored with these nasty people,' he grumbled one day. The witty but sycophantic writer Denis von Vizin saw his opportunity: 'Why do you let such scoundrels in? You should order them barred.'

'Really?' said the Prince. 'I'll do it tomorrow.' The next day, von Vizin arrived at the Palace, satisfied at having expelled his rivals from the Prince's circle. The Guards would not admit him.

'There must be some mistake,' said von Vizin.

'No,' replied the doorman. 'I know you, and His Highness ordered me not to admit you, thanks to your own advice yesterday.'⁴¹

A general, kept waiting for hours in the antechamber, shouted that he would not be treated 'like a corporal' and demanded to be received, whatever the Prince was doing. Potemkin had him shown into his office. When the general came in, the Prince got up, an unheard-of honour. 'Your Highness, please!', said the general.

'I'm on my way to the lavatory,' laughed the Prince.[63] When an impoverished old colonel burst into his office to ask for a pension, Potemkin snapped, 'Get him out of here.' An adjutant approached the Colonel, who punched him and went on hitting him even on the floor. Potemkin ran over, pulled them apart and led the veteran into his apartments. The Colonel received a new job, travel expenses and a bonus.⁴²

Serenissimus feared no one and felt that, like a tsar, he was on a different level from the aristocracy: indeed, he identified much more with the Russian peasant or the European cosmopolitan than the Russian nobleman. At Mogilev, when he caught a provincial governor cheating at faro, he grabbed him by the collar and cuffed him. He once struck a grand seigneur, a Vol- konsky, because he clapped at one of Potemkin's jokes. 'What, you applaud me as if I was a jester.' Slap! 'There ... that's the way to treat this sort of scoundrel.' The chastized nobleman kept away from the Prince's table for a week but was soon back.⁴³

Midday

Once the audiences were over, Popov reappeared with piles of papers to sign. Potemkin shared with Kaunitz the distinction of being Europe's most flamboyant hypochondriac: he always saw his doctors while going over state papers. 'A torrent of correspondence fell on Prince Potemkin and I don't know how he could be so patient with all the idiots who attack him every­where,' observed Miranda.⁴⁴ These varied from German princes and Russian widows to Greek pirates and Italian cardinals. All used the word 'importune' in their requests, which were often requesting lands in the south or the opportunity to serve in the army. One has the impression that Potemkin was in correspondence with virtually every prince in the Holy Roman Empire, which he called 'the archipelago of princes'. Even kings apologized if their letters were too long. 'I know by experience', wrote King Stanislas-Augustus of Poland, 'how one doesn't like long letters when one is busy...'.

He received many ludicrous letters of over-the-top flattery such as the Samgrass-like Professor Bataille who sent an ode to Catherine adding: 'Could I, Monseigneur, write without a mention of Your Highness? Deign you, Monseigneur, to cast a glance on my work.'⁴⁵ Potemkin's fifty-strong per- ambulant Chancellery answered many of these, but he was also notorious for forgetting to reply to eminent people like the King of Sweden: Field-Marshal Loudon, an Austrianized Scotsman, complained to Joseph II that 'Prince Potemkin had had the politeness not to reply to two letters he had sent him.'

There were also tragic requests for help from unfortunates of all ranks which give a glimpse of life in that time: a male protege of Potemkin's thanked him for his help in marrying one of the Naryshkin girls, who suddenly revealed that she had 20,000 roubles of debts, obviously from playing cards, probably faro, the heroin addiction of its day. Some were from aristocrats in trouble like the Princess Bariatinskaya, who wrote from Turin, 'I struggle against the horrors of misery,' but 'you alone my Prince can make a woman happy who has been unhappy all her life'. Another German count, dismissed by the Empress, wrote, 'I can no longer have the means to sustain a wife always ill, a girl of 14, sons ...'. An ordinary man wrote: 'I beg you to have pity on us .. .'.^4б But, being Potemkin, there was always some exotica: one mysterious correspondent was Elias Abaise, soi-disant Prince of Palestina, who confessed, 'I am forced by misery lacking so greatly money, credit and all the basic necessities, to implore the high protection and benevolence of Your Highness ... and to aid my departure ... winter is coming.' It was signed in Arabic. Was this a Wandering Jew or Arab from the Ottoman province of Palestine? If so, what was he doing in St Petersburg in August 1780? And would Potemkin help him? 'Your Highness', reads the next letter, 'has had the favour to give me gracious help.'⁴⁷

The Prince wrote many replies himself, in his scratchy, slanted hand, in Russian or French, but Popov was so trusted that the Prince told him his wishes and the secretary sent them out in his own name. Potemkin was extremely tolerant towards his subordinates⁴⁸ - even when they were making a mess of things. First he gave them their orders again. If tolerance did not work, he tried biting, if droll, sarcasm. When Admiral Voinovich made excuses after a ship ran aground, the Prince replied: 'I am very pleased to learn the ship Alexander is wedged off a sandbar but it would've been better not to have run into it... I like your view that this accident will make officers more diligent but I wish and demand diligence without accidents ... And if Captain Baronov is such an experienced seaman I would be more convinced ... if he ran Turkish ships on to sandbars and not his own.'⁴⁹

Before dinner, the Prince liked to be alone for an hour. It was then that he came up with the richness of political ideas that distinguished him from Catherine's other advisers. Popov and his secretaries seldom interrupted him. This was a golden rule: one secretary who did not get the message was actually sacked for speaking. Potemkin would call for his jewels.

Jewels calmed the Prince as much as music. He sat there with a little saw, some silver and a box of diamonds.⁵⁰ Sometimes visitors noticed him sitting alone like a giant child, playing with them, pouring them from hand to hand, making them into patterns and drawings until he had worked out the problem.⁵¹

He showered his nieces with diamonds. Vigee Lebrun said that Ska- vronskaya's jewellery box in Naples was the richest she had ever seen. Ligne marvelled that he had a 100,000 rouble fleece of diamonds in his collection.⁵² Jewels were another good way to win favour. 'I send you a little red ruby and bigger blue ruby,'⁵³ wrote Sashenka's husband, Branicki, in one of his shockingly obsequious letters. Potemkin's correspondence with his jewellers showed his impatient enthusiasm. 'I'm sending Your Highness the ruby of St Catherine,' wrote Alexis Deuza, probably a Greek craftsman working in Potemkin's stone-cutting fabrick at Ozerki, 'It's not as fine as I'd like, to perfect this sort of work, one needs a cylinder and the one Your Highness ordered won't be ready for ten ... days and I did not think I should wait. It seems Your Highness wants it urgently.'⁵⁴ His spending reveals his passionate pursuit of brilliants: he owed a procession of merchants money for 'diamonds, gems, amethyst, topaz and aquamarine, pearls'.⁵⁵ Everything had to be exquis­ite and beautiful. Here is a typical bill from Duval, a French jeweller, in February 1784:

A big sapphire of 18.3/4 carats - 1500 Roubles Two diamonds of 5.3/8 carats - 600 R 10 diamonds of 20 carats - 2200 R 15 diamonds of 14.5 carats - 912 R 78 diamonds of 14.5 carats - 725 R .. J⁶

It was not just jewels: a bill from his bankers Tepper in Warsaw lists two gold snuff-boxes engraved with diamonds, a gold watch, a golden repeater clock engraved with diamonds, a 'souvenir-a-brilliants', some music, eighteen pens, customs for paintings imported from Vienna, payments to a Polish agent of influence, 15,000 roubles payed to 'the Jew Hosias' for unnamed work, all totalling almost 30,000 roubles.⁵⁷

Potemkin's payment for all this was so hit-and-miss that it too has gone into legend. There were virtually always unpaid jewellers and craftsmen among the petitioners crowding his apartments. It was said that when a creditor arrived Potemkin used to signal to Popov: if the sign was an open hand, the merchant was paid. If it was a closed fist, he was sent away. None of them dared confront him directly at Court. But the Swiss court jeweller Fasi was said to have slipped his bill under Potemkin's plate at the Empress's table. Serenissimus thought it was a billet-doux and was furious when he read it. Catherine laughed and Potemkin always admired courage so he paid the bill. But, to teach the jeweller for his insolence, he delivered it in copper coins, enough to fill two rooms.⁵⁸

Dinner

At about 1 p.m., the jewels were put away and the Prince's guests arrived for dinner, the main meal in the eighteenth century, at a table set for eighteen, usually officers, visitors and his best friends of the moment, from Segur or Ligne to Lady Craven or Samuel Bentham. Potemkin's friendships, as we saw with Harris, were as intense as love affairs - and tended to end in disillusionment. 'The true secret of winning his friendship', said Segur, 'was not fearing him.' When he arrived in Petersburg and called on Potemkin, Segur was kept waiting so long that he stormed out. Next day, the Prince sent him an apology, invited him back and greeted him a gorgeous suit in which every seam was embroidered with diamonds. When Potemkin was lying in bed, depressed, he said to Segur: 'My dear Comte, let us lay aside all ceremony ... and live like two friends.' Once he had befriended someone, he favoured his companion above all the highest imperial grandees, as Sam Bentham discovered.⁵⁹ Potemkin was a loyal friend: in private, he was caressing and warm but in public he seemed 'haughty and arrogant'. This was probably due to that surprising shyness.⁶⁰ Miranda actually saw him blush bashfully at the obsequious attention he received.⁶¹

The Prince was a master of conversation in an era when wit was especially prized. 'Sometimes serious, sometime hilarious,' recalled Segur, 'always keen to discuss some ecclesiastical question, always switching from gravity to laughter, wearing his knowledge lightly.' Ligne said that if he wanted to charm someone, he possessed 'the art of conquering every heart'. He was an immensely rewarding, enjoyable and impossible companion, 'scolding or laughing, mimicking or swearing, engaged in wantonness or prayers, singing or meditating'. He could be 'uncommonly affable or extremely savage'. But, when 'savage', his harshness often concealed 'the greatest benevolence of heart'. Bentham had never known such 'merriment' as he did travelling in

Potemkin's carriage. The poet Derzhavin remembered Potemkin for 'his kind heart and great generosity'.⁶² He was also deeply kind: 'The more I see of his Character,' Sam Bentham told Pole Carew, 'the more reason I have to esteem and admire it.'⁶³

His geniality was combined with a heartfelt humanity and care for ordinary people, especially soldiers, that was rare in the age of cannon-fodder. Ligne noticed he was 'never vengeful, asking pardon for a pain he has inflicted, quickly repairing an injustice'. When Potemkin bought Prince Lubomirski's estates in Poland, he ordered that 'all the gallows ... must be destroyed as soon as possible without trace', wishing that the peasants obey him 'through respect for their duty and not from fear of punishment'.⁶⁴ His military reforms were designed to give more comfort to his troops, quite a new notion in that century, though he was also increasing their effectiveness. But his constant orders to be more lenient in punishments were unique in the Russian army: again and again, he ordered that beatings should be reduced. 'All compulsion ... must be eradicated,' he wrote in one order. 'Lazy ones can be forced by the stick but not more than six lashes. Every kind of compulsion ... has to be eradicated.'⁶⁵ His repeated orders to feed the troops with warm nourishing food, regarded by Russian generals as mollycoddling, sound absolutely modern.⁶⁶

'He was neither vindictive nor rancorous yet everybody was afraid of him,'⁶⁷ recalled the memoirist Wiegel, who believed that this explained the ambiguous attitude to Potemkin. His very tolerance and good nature confused the Russians. 'The way he looked at people, his movements, it seemed, said to all those around him "You're not worth my anger." His lack of severity and indulgence clearly originated from his unlimited disdain.'⁶⁸

Dinner was served at about 1.30 p.m. and even if there were only a total of sixteen guests, as when Lady Craven attended such an event at the Taurida, the sixty-strong horn orchestra played during the meal.⁶⁹ The Prince was a notorious Epicurean and trencherman - Shcherbatov called him 'the omnipo­tent glutton'.⁷⁰ As political tensions rose, he must have eaten for comfort or as a locomotive consumes coal. He never lost his taste for simple peasant food, yet he also served caviar from the Caspian, smoked goose from Hamburg, cucumbers from Nizhny Novgorod, pastries from Kaluga, oysters from the Baltic, melons and oranges from Astrakhan and China, figs from Provence. He loved pain doux de Savoie⁷¹ for dessert and expected to eat his favourite dish, sterlet soup from the Caspian, made with the young sturgeon fish, wherever he was. Soon after his arrival in St Petersburg in 1780, Reginald Pole Carew attended 'an ordinary' dinner at Potemkin's and listed the 'exquis­ite and rare dishes': 'remarkable, fine white veal from Archangel, a joint of delicious mutton from Little Bokhara, a suckling pig from Poland, conserves from Persia, caviar from the Caspian'.⁷² All was cooked by Ballez,[64] his French chef de cuisine.⁷³

Serenissimus also appreciated wine, not just his own from Soudak in the Crimea, but, as Carew Pole recorded,⁷⁴ from all the 'Ports of Europe and the Grecian isles, the Cape and the borders of the Don'. No toast was complete without champagne.⁷⁵ If a Russian ambassador in southern Europe, like Skavronsky in Naples, wanted to win favour, he sent a Classical column - and some barrels of wine.⁷⁶

One day, at the height of his fortunes, Serenissimus sat down to dinner. He was very cheerful, playing the fool until towards the end of the meal when he became quiet. He started biting his nails. Guests and servants waited to see what he would say. Finally, he asked:

Can any man be more happy than I am? Everything I have ever wanted, I have; all my whims have been fulfilled as if by magic. I wanted high rank, I have it; I wanted medals, I have them; I loved gambling, I have lost vast sums; I liked giving parties, I've given magnificent ones; I enjoy building houses, I've raised palaces; I liked buying estates, I have many; I adore diamonds and beautiful things - no individual in Europe owns rarer or more exquisite stones. In a word, all my passions have been sated. I am entirely happy!

At this, the Prince swept the priceless china plates on to the floor, smashed them all, stormed off to his bedroom and locked himself inside.

Potemkin suffered from his own surfeit of everything: he regarded himself as 'fortune's child'; indeed he often used the phrase. But sometimes the scale of his success seemed to disgust him. Perhaps this was deeply Russian: he was ashamed of his vast power and proud of his turbulent soul, repulsed by the cold machinery of state, proud of his boundless capacity for suffering and self-abasement in which the greatness of the Russian character resides. His appetites for fame, fortune and pleasure were insatiable - yet they did not make him happy. Only massive accomplishment, whether in statesmanship or battle, aesthetic beauty, in music or art, or the serenity of religious mysticism, seemed to excuse the obscenity of mere power.⁷⁷

Once he called for his adjutant and ordered coffee. Someone rushed out to get it. Then he asked again. Another courier was despatched. Finally he ordered it again and again, almost in a frenzy. But when it arrived he said, 'It's unnecessary. I only wanted to wait for something but now I've been deprived even of that pleasure.'⁷⁸

Afternoon: The Lover's Hour

The afternoon was traditionally the 'lovers' hour' in Russia, like the Gallic cinq-a-sept or the Spanish siesta. There must have been much coming and going of closed carriages and ladies' maids bringing billets-doux to Potemkin's house. Still more married women were now sending him love letters, begging to see him. One of them always hailed him: 'Hello, my unique friend!' These unpublished notes, handwritten in an argot of French and Russian but always unsigned and undated, fill an entire section of the archive. 'I have not been able to give you pleasure because I've had no time, you left so quickly,' wrote another in a big girlish hand. This was repeated in all the love letters. When the same woman wrote again, she declared, 'I wait with the most tender impatience the moment when I can come to kiss you. While waiting, I do it in my imagination and with equal tenderness.'

Serenissimus' whims and moods tormented his mistresses. 'You're rendering me mad with love,' wrote one. His restlessness and long departures to the south made him unobtainably attractive: 'I'm so angry at being prevented from [having] the pleasure of embracing you,' wrote one girl. 'Don't forget that I beg you to be persuaded that I am involved only with you!' But it seemed that Potemkin had soon forgotten that. 'Don't forget me,' she beseeched him later. 'You have forgotten.' Yet another declared melodramatically that 'if I didn't live in the hope of being loved by you, I would give myself to Death'. Finally, driven to the edge by Potemkin's impossible lack of commitment, the girls had to retreat and become friends again: 'I don't want to recall the past and I forget all except that I loved you and that suffices to wish sincerely for your happiness ... Adieu, топ Prince.'⁷⁹

He was accustomed to languish on his divan surrounded by women like a sultan, though he called his harem 'the hen-run'. He always enjoyed the company of women and saw no need to restrain his 'Epicurean appetites'.⁸⁰ Diplomats always called his maitresse en titre 'sultana-in-chief'. But he behaved 'nobly' to his mistresses, according to Samoilov, who had reason to know since his wife was probably one of them: his affairs were always questions of passion, not merely vanity, 'as they are for many famous people'.⁸¹ His subordinates knew they had to keep their wives at a distance if they wanted to preserve their virtue. Potemkin's 'wandering and capricious glance sometimes stopped, or better to say, slid, upon my mother's good-looking face', recalled Wiegel. One day, a 'fool' in his entourage told him that Wiegel's mother had the most exquisite feet. 'Indeed,' said Potemkin, 'I hadn't noticed. Some time I'll call her over and ask her to show me them without stockings.' Wiegel's father quickly despatched her to their estates.⁸²

If Potemkin was bored, he often went over to the palace of Catherine's buffoonish friend, the Master of Horse, Lev Naryshkin, where eating, drink­ing and dancing went on all day and night. Potemkin treated it like his private club - he usually sat in his own special alcove - as it was the ideal place to meet high-born married mistresses. 'It was the foyer of all pleasure,' wrote Segur, 'the rendezvous of all the lovers because, in the midst of so many happy people, secret trysts were 100 times easier than at balls or salons where etiquette reigned.' The Prince relaxed there, sometimes in silence, sometimes 'very cheerful, chatting to women, he who never talked to anyone'. Potemkin, whom 'one hardly saw anywhere else', was drawn by the Naryshkin daugh­ters, with whom he was 'always' in 'tete-a-tete'. He seemed to work his way through the Naryshkin girls: 'he consoles himself for the absence of his niece with Madame de Solugub, daughter of Madame Naryshkina', reported Cobenzl to his Emperor. Ivan Solugub was one of his generals. All his officers had to endure his conquests both on the battlefield and in their own households.⁸³

The Prince still dominated the lives of all his nieces and insisted on running their households whenever possible. His 'angel of fleshly delights', Katinka Skavronskaya, was inconveniently visiting her operatic husband in Naples, but we can follow her movements across Europe by Potemkin's instructions to his bankers to pay for her expenses. When she passed through Vienna, even Emperor Joseph had to entertain⁸⁴ 'your kitten', as Catherine tolerantly called her.⁸⁵ By 1786, Katinka was 'more beautiful than ever', according to that connoisseur Cobenzl, and always 'favourite sultana-in-chief' of her uncle's harem.⁸⁶

The spirited Sashenka Branicka was as imperious as her uncle: they were always arguing, even though they were closest of all. In 1788, Serenissimus tried to remove Mademoiselle Guibald from one of the Engelhardt house­holds. Guibald was the Frenchwoman in Potemkin's entourage who had supposedly stolen Harris's letter and became a companion for the nieces and a seraglio-manageress for the Prince. Branicka refused to dismiss her, so he wrote to insist because Guibald 'wants my niece to remain a child for ever'. We do not know which niece was being discussed, but all were married by then. Branicka evidently reassured the French lady, which made Potemkin furious: 'I'm master of my house and I want what I wish. I don't understand how Countess Branicka dared to calm her against my will ...'. The Prince believed that 'my exalted station confers benefits on my relatives; they owe me everything and they'd be in a paltry state without me ...'. He stated simply: 'There are a lot of reasons but the main one is that I wish it to be so.'⁸⁷

Evening

At about 10.30 p.m., when the Empress retired with her favourite, Potemkin, who usually spent the early evening in attendance, whether at the Little Hermitage or at a ball, received his 'pink ticket'. His real day, as it were, was just beginning. He woke up at night, his most creative hours. One could define absolutism as the power to overrule even the laws of time. Potemkin paid no attention to the clock and his subordinates had to do the same: he was an insomniac, said Ligne, 'constantly lying down, but never sleeping whether day or night'.⁸⁸

Night

Sir James Harris experienced the Prince's nocturnal habits: 'His hours for eating and sleeping are uncertain and we were frequently airing in the rain in an open carriage at midnight.'⁸⁹ There is no more Potemkinish scene than that.

Potemkin was relentlessly curious and was always asking questions, teasing and provoking his companions, discussing religion, politics, art and sex - 'the biggest questioner in the world'. His questions reminded Richelieu of 'a bee, which with the help of the flowers, whose pollen it sucks, creates an exquisite substance'. In this case the 'honey' was Potemkin's racy and pungent con­versation, aided by a flawless memory and a whimsical imagination.⁹⁰

Everyone who met Potemkin and even those who loathed him had to admit that he was gifted with admirable mental equipment: 'Potemkin joined the gift of prodigious memory with that of natural, lively, quick mind .. Л⁹¹ Ligne thought he had 'natural abilities, an excellent memory, much elevation of soul; malice without the design of injuring, artifice without craft, a happy mixture of caprices', concluding that he had 'the talent of guessing what he is ignorant of and a consummate knowledge of mankind'. Not every Westerner liked Potemkin: Sir John Sinclair called him 'a worthless and dangerous character', but even he thought Potemkin had 'great abilities'.⁹² His more intelligent Russian opponents agreed: Simon Vorontsov believed the Prince had 'lots of intelligence, intrigue and credit' but lacked 'knowledge, appli­cation and virtue'.⁹³

Segur was often astonished by Potemkin's knowledge 'not only of politics but travellers, savants, writers, artists and even artisans'. All those who knew him acclaimed his 'vast erudition on antiquities'. His travelling companion in the south, Miranda, was amazed by his knowledge of architecture, art and music. 'It seems this man of so much intelligence and prodigious memory also wanted to study sciences and arts in depth and that he has achieved this to some extent,' wrote the Venezuelan after they had discussed the music of Hayden and Boccherini, the paintings of Murillo and the writings of Chappe d'Auteroche - he turned out to be profoundly knowledgeable on all of them.⁹⁴ It was no wonder that Damas owed 'the most instructive and agreeable moments of my life' to the 'strange' Prince.⁹⁵

His knowledge of Russian history was equally impressive. 'Thanks for your chronology, it's the best part in my Russian history,' wrote Catherine about her Notes on Russian History, with which he helped her. The partners loved history. 'I've spent years researching this subject,' Catherine told Seinac de Meilhan, the French official and writer. 'I've always loved to read things no one else reads. I've only found one man who has the same taste - that's 344 ^the co-tsar

Marshal Prince Potemkin.'⁹⁶ Here was another pleasure they shared. When the translator of the History of Armenia, one of Potemkin's pet subjects, was hanged by the Turks, 'Prince Potemkin', joked Catherine to Grimm, 'was very angry about it.'⁹⁷

He always wanted to set up his own printing press, and Jeremy Bentham tried to help him find one.⁹⁸ Just before the war started, Potemkin at last acquired his press, which was to follow him around throughout the war, printing political journals and classics in Russian, French, Latin and Greek, as well as his own compositions.⁹⁹

Segur and his friend Ligne claimed that Potemkin 'had less acquired his knowledge from books than from men'. This was clearly untrue. The Prince was widely read. Pole Carew, who spent so much time with him at the start of the decade, stated his culture came from 'copious reading in his earlier years' - hence his 'knowledge and taste for the Greek language'.¹⁰⁰ Potemkin's advice to Catherine on a Greek education for the little Grand Dukes shows his artistic ear for the Greek language: 'It's hard to imagine how much knowledge and delicate taste one can get from learning it. The language has the loveliest harmony and much play of thought.'¹⁰¹

His library, which he gradually expanded by buying collections from scholars and friends like Archbishop Voulgaris, reveals his broad interests: there were all the classics from Seneca, Horace and Plutarch to Les Amours de Sappho, published in Paris in 1724; many works of theology, war, agri­culture and economics including Coutumes monastiques, manuals of artillery, Uniformes Militaires and La Rich esse des Nations de Schmitt (Adam Smith); many works on Peter the Great, but also the masterpieces of the philosophes from Voltaire and Diderot to Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. His Anglophilia and his obsession with English gardens were covered in histories of England, the works of Locke and Newton, the Caricatures de Hoguard (Hogarth) and of course Britannia lllustri ou deux livres des vues des principales maisons et jardins ... de la Grande Bretagne. By the time he died his huge collection contained 1,065 foreign works and 106 in Russian: it filled eighteen carriages.¹⁰²

His political ideas were quintessential^ Russian, despite imbibing the tolerance of the philosophes and the utilitarianism of Bentham. He believed that absolutism was the best system for an empire the size of Russia. The ruler was a woman and a state and he served both. The three revolutions - the American, French and Polish - appalled and fascinated him. He cross- examined Segur about the Americans, for whom the Frenchman had fought, but 'did not believe that republican institutions could have a long life in a land so vast. His mind, so accustomed to absolute despotism, could not admit the possibility of a union of order and liberty.'¹⁰³ As for the French Revolution, Potemkin simply told the Comte de Langeron: 'Colonel, your countrymen are a pack of madmen.'¹⁰⁴ The Prince believed that politics was the art of infinite flexibility and philosophical patience in order to attain a fixed object­ive. 'You must have patience,' he lectured Harris, 'depend on it. The chapter of accidents will serve you better than all your rhetoric.' Potemkin's political motto was 'Improve events as they arise.'¹⁰⁵[65]

The Prince liked to talk 'divinity to his generals and tactics to his bishops', said Ligne, and Lev Engelhardt observed him 'playing off' his 'erudite rabbis, Old Believers and different scholars against each other'.¹⁰⁶ His 'favourite topic' was the 'separation of the Greek and Latin Churches', the only sure way to win his attention was talk about 'the Councils of Nicaea, Chalcedon and Florence'. Sometimes he wanted to found a religious order, sometimes wander Russia as a monk. This was why Frederick the Great had ordered his ambassador in the 1770s to study Orthodoxy, the best way to befriend the Prince.

He joked about religion - teasing Suvorov for observance of fasts - 'You wish to enter paradise astride a sturgeon' - but essentially he was a serious 'son of the Church', never joining the Masonic lodges.¹⁰⁷ He may have swung between being a coenobite and a sybarite, but he was certainly a believer, who could tell Catherine during the coming war, 'Christ will help, He'll put an end to our adversity. Look through your life and you can see what a lot of unexpected benefits came to you from Him in misfortune ... It was a mere chance that your coronation coincided with the feast of the Apostles' - and who could then quote the appropriate chapter 16 verse 1 from the Epistle of Paul to the Romans.¹⁰⁸ He often dreamed of retiring to the Church. 'Be a good mother,' he asked Catherine, 'prepare a good bishop's mitre and a quiet tenure.'¹⁰⁹ Potemkin never let religion ruin his pleasures - Segur 'saw him spend a morning examining models of hats for dragoons, bonnets and dresses for his nieces, and mitres and habits for priests'. He staggered from church to orgy and back, 'waving with one hand to the women that please him and with the other making the sign of the Cross', observed Ligne, 'embracing the feet of a statue of the Virgin or the alabaster neck of his mistress'.¹¹⁰ A religious man and a great sinner, he was the 'epitome of the Russian's staggering ability to live upright within while enveloped in unceasing sin'.¹¹¹