Prince of Princes -The Life of Potemkin

The Prince also passed much of the night at the green baize tables. If French was the language that united Europe, faro was the game: a squire from Leicestershire, a mountebank from Venice, a planter from Virginia and an officer from Sebastopol played the same game that required no language. A night of faro at Potemkin's Palace in the mid-1780s was probably very much like a game at Chatsworth with Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, who was also a compulsive gamester. The players would sit at an oval table covered in green baize with a wooden rim across it to separate the cards. A tailleur (banker) sat opposite the croup and the players bet on the cards turned up on either side of the rim. The players could double stakes all the way up to a soixante et le va - sixty times the stake, all of which was wordlessly announced by complicated mutilations, or bending, of the cards. Thus faro peculiarly suited Potemkin: the taking of vast risks without the need to speak a word.

He used gambling in a very Potemkinish manner. One occasion was recounted later by Pushkin. A young man, named 'Sh.', was about to be ruined by the debts owed to 'Prince B.', who was going to complain to the Empress. The young man's family begged Potemkin to intercede. He sent a message to 'Sh.' to visit him during the card game the next day and insisted, 'Tell him to be bolder with me.' When 'Sh.' arrived, Potemkin was already playing. When 'Prince B.' arrived, he was poorly received, so he sat and watched the game. Suddenly Potemkin called 'Sh.' over and, showing him his cards, asked, 'Tell me, brother, how would you play this hand?' Young 'Sh.', remembering his instructions, replied rudely, 'What affair is it of mine? Play the best you can!' Everyone watched Potemkin to see how he would react to this insolence. 'Dear me,' said Serenissimus, 'one can't say a word to you, batinka. You fly straight off the handle!' When 'Prince B.' saw this, he realized that 'Sh.' must be in the highest favour with Potemkin and Catherine. He never called in the debt.¹¹² Gamblers played for rouleaux of banknotes, but the Prince had long since forgotten the value of money. So he insisted that they play for gemstones, which sat beside him on the green baize in a glistening pile.¹¹³ Debts were settled among adventurers by duels - but not by a man of Potemkin's stature. Nonetheless, his fellow gamblers risked cheating because, while Potemkin was playing for fun backed by Catherine's bottomless purse, they were placing their entire family fortunes at the mercy of the dice. When one player (possibly Levashov, Yermolov's uncle) paid his winnings with rhinestones, Potemkin said nothing but arranged his vengeance with the coachman. That afternoon during a storm, the Prince went riding alongside the cheat's carriage. When the carriage was in the midst of a flooded field, Potemkin yelled, 'Off you go,' to the coachman, who galloped off with the horses, leaving the victim behind. When he finally walked home, hours later, his silk clothes soaked, the bedraggled cheat was greeted with gales of laughter from the Prince at the window. But nothing more was ever said about his cheating.¹¹⁴

Potemkin's games could not be interrupted. When summoned to the Council, he simply refused to go. When the messenger humbly asked the reason, Potemkin snapped, 'In the ist Psalm and ist verse.' When the Council looked it up, this read: 'Beatus vir qui non abiit in consilio impiorum,'[66] thereby simultaneously displaying his wit, memory, arrogance, theological knowledge and gambling mania."⁵

Somehow, between sunset and sunrise, the Prince also sliced through swathes of papers - it was probably when he did the greatest part of his work.

His secretaries were on duty and Popov, in between gambling bouts, often stood behind his chair with pen and pad, awaiting his orders, recording his ideas.

Dawn

When this insomniac finally went to sleep, the carriage of one of his mistresses sometimes stood on Millionaya Street outside the Winter Palace. Inside it, the lady longingly and lovingly watched the candles still burning, just before dawn. 'I passed your house and I saw all the lights on. No doubt you were playing cards. My dear Prince ... give me this pleasure, do something for me and don't stay up as you do until four or five in the morning ... my darling Prince.'¹¹⁶

Since the Prince could not live without his English gardens, the travels of his gardener William Gould were a weathervane of Potemkin's intentions. In late 1786, the English 'Emperor of Gardens' set off for the south in style with his 'general staff' of gardeners and workmen. The cognoscenti knew this meant that something important was afoot.¹¹⁷ The Empress was about to depart on her grandiose journey to the Crimea to meet the Holy Roman Emperor under the gaze of Europe. In November 1786, Serenissimus, the impresario of this imperial progress, departed to make the last checks on the route. On this trip, he excelled himself in his flamboyant choice of carriage companions: a Venezuelan liberator and mountebank who kept a diary of his Ukrainian whorings, and an aspiring king of Ouidah and freebooter, who had been seduced by the Queen of Tahiti.

PART SEVEN

The Apogee 1787-1790

THE MAGICAL THEATRE

Louis XIV would have been jealous of his sister Catherine II, or he would have married her... The Empress received me... She recalled to my mind a thousand things that monarchs alone can remember for their memory is always excellent.

Prince de Ligne

On 7 December 1786, Francisco de Miranda, aged thirty-seven, a cultured, cynical and rakish revolutionary of dubious Creole nobility, who had been cashiered from the Spanish army and was travelling from Constantinople to raise support for a free Venezuela, awaited Potemkin in Kherson. The whole town was preparing for the arrival of the Prince, who was on his final tour of inspection before the visit of Catherine II and the Holy Roman Emperor to his territories. Everyone was waiting. The cannons were primed, the troops were drilled. There were rumours that he was on his way, but still the 'mysterious godhead', as Miranda called him, did not come. 'No one knew where he would be going next.' Waiting for Serenissimus was one of the hallmarks of Potemkin's power. Nothing could be done without him. The more powerful he became, the more everything stopped in anticipation of his arrival. Potemkin had to be welcomed like a tsar or at least a member of the imperial family - on Catherine's orders. His whims were unpredictable, his travelling so swift that he could descend on a town without warning - hence everything had to be kept in a state of the highest readiness. 'You don't ride,' Catherine teased him. 'You fly.'¹

Twenty days later, on 28 December, Miranda was still waiting. Then at sundown 'the much desired Prince Potemkin' arrived to the boom of cannons. Soldiers and officials went to pay their respects to the 'favourite idol'.² Miranda was taken by his friends to the Prince's exotic Court, inhabited by all the 'cretins and respectable people' Kherson could hold. 'My goodness, what a bunch of sycophants and crooked rascals,' wrote Miranda, 'but anyway what most amused me was the variety of costumes that could be seen there - Cossacks, Greeks, Jews' - and Caucasian ambassadors in uniforms a la Prusse. Suddenly a giant emerged, bowing here and there, not speaking to anyone. The Venezuelan was introduced to the Prince as a Spanish count (which he was not). Potemkin said little - but his curiosity was aroused.

On з i December, Potemkin's aide summoned Miranda, only for the Vene­zuelan to find Potemkin taking tea with Prince Charles de Nassau-Siegen.³ 'Give me strength!', thought Miranda at the sight of Nassau, whom he knew from Spain and Constantinople, and regarded with the disdain that only one adventurer can feel for another. They had both led tumultuous lives. Miranda had fought for the Spanish as far as afield as Algiers and Jamaica, and knew Washington and Jefferson from his years in America. Nassau-Siegen, aged forty-two, impoverished heir to a tiny principality, become a soldier of fortune at fifteen, joined Bougainville's expedition of global circumnavigation during which he killed a tiger, tried to make himself king of Ouidah in west Africa,⁴ and made love to the Queen of Tahiti. On his return, he commanded the unfortunate Franco-Spanish assault on Gibraltar in 1782 and launched a raid on Jersey. Ruthless and reckless in war and intrigue, Nassau moved east. He wooed Princess Sangushko, a Polish widow. Each thought the other was rich. Once they were married, both discovered the other was not as advertised. But it turned out to be a happy marriage of strong characters and they impressed the salons of Warsaw by keeping fifty bears on their Podolian estate to repel Cossacks. Nassau-Siegen had recently become Potemkin's travelling companion when King Stanislas-Augustus sent him to ask the Prince to bring his Polish clientele to order. But Nassau also hoped to inveigle himself into Potemkin's favour to win trading rights in Kherson.⁵

The Prince was interrogating Miranda about South America when Ribas, his Neapolitan courtier, rushed in and announced that his mistress had arrived. She called herself 'Countess' Sevres, but 'whatever her origins', wrote Miranda, 'she is a whore.' That did not matter: everyone rushed to court her. Her companion was Mademoiselle Guibald, the governess of Potemkin's nieces and now the itinerant manageress of his southern seraglio. Potemkin kissed his mistress and sat her on his right - 'he sleeps with her without the slightest ceremony', noted Miranda. A quintet began playing Boccherini. Over the next few days, the exuberant Potemkin, holding court at 'Countess' Sevres's apartments in his Palace, could not be without the company of his two new friends, Miranda and Nassau-Siegen. Both, in their different ways, were remarkable - Nassau-Siegen was known as the 'paladin' of the age and Miranda was the father of South American liberation, so we are lucky that the latter recorded his experiences in his sceptical and unprejudiced diaries. Potemkin even prepared them a fricassee with his own hands while discussing Algerian pirates and Polish aspirations. Miranda was pleased that the court­iers were 'exploding' with jealousy at this new friendship.⁶

The Prince invited Nassau and Miranda to accompany him on his lightning inspection of the imperial route. Potemkin knew that the success or failure of Catherine's journey would either make him unassailable - or ruin him. The cabinets of Europe were watching. England, Prussia and the Sublime Porte stirred uneasily as Potemkin created new cities and fleets to threaten Con­stantinople. The Empress's Crimean trip had been delayed because of plague, but there was always a suspicion that it could not take place because nothing in the south had been done - 'there are people who supposed', Cobenzl told Joseph, 'that all necessary to make the tour cannot be ready'.⁷

At 10 p.m. on 5 January 1787, Potemkin, Miranda and Nassau set off, crossing frozen rivers at high speed - three of the most extraordinary men of their epoch in one carriage. They galloped all night, thrice changing horses, stopping at a house of Potemkin's on the way, to reach Perekop, the gateway to the Crimea, at 8 a.m., having covered 160 miles in twenty hours.⁸ They crossed short distances in a roomy travelling coach, but since it was now midwinter they often used kibitkas (light carriages) mounted on sleighs - their wheels were removed - to glide swiftly over the snowy steppes, almost alone. Travelling in a kibitka was like lying in a space capsule: 'they are exactly like cradles, the head having windows to the front', Lady Craven recalled. 'I can sit, or lie, at length, and feel in one like an overgrown baby, comfortably defended from the cold by pillows and blankets.' The rough terrain and high speed made it even more risky. Passengers were subjected to continuous 'shaking and violent thumps ... the hardest head might be broken. I was overturned twice.' But the Russian postillions thought nothing of it: they just got silently off their horses, set the carriage up again and 'never ask if the carriage is hurt'.⁹ They would then hurtle away again.

The Prince inspected the Crimea, where Miranda saw the new fleet, troops, cities and plantations. He admired the palaces prepared for the Empress at Simferopol, Bakhchisaray, Sebastopol and Karasubazaar, and the English gardens that William Gould was laying out around them. When they arrived at Sebastopol, the officers insisted on giving a ball for the Prince, who blushed when a toast was given in his honour. Miranda laughed at some of the officers, who 'jumped and hopped about' like 'Parisian petit maitres\ They then inspected Inkerman before galloping back to Simferopol, where the travellers went hunting for two days as Potemkin worked.¹⁰

Potemkin was accompanied everywhere by Tartar horsemen in regular cavalry squadrons: 'fifty escorted the carriage at every moment', Nassau- Siegen told his wife, 'and the Tartars of every locality where we passed arrived from every direction so the countryside was covered in men who, running, from every direction, gave it an air of war.' The 'paladin' thought it was all 'superb'.¹¹ Miranda also noticed how Potemkin carefully cultivated all the local Islamic muftis in each town. Serenissimus was accompanied by his court artist, Ivanov, who painted as they travelled, and music - ranging from string quartets to Ukrainian choirs - played wherever they stopped. One day Miranda found Potemkin admiring 'a very famous pearl necklace embellished with diamonds'.¹² The Venezuelan had never seen a 'more noble or beautiful adornment in my life'. It was indeed so valuable that when it was bought from Mack, the Viennese Court jewellers, the identity of the buyer was kept secret. Even Joseph II wanted to know who had bought it. Finally Cobenzl revealed the secret to his Emperor: Potemkin was planning to present it to the Empress on her tour.¹³

The three travellers took tea at the English dairy run for Potemkin by Mr Henderson and his two dubious 'nieces', recruited by the Benthams, then headed for the vineyards of Soudak. He presented a vineyard to Nassau, who at once ordered vines from Constantinople. The soldiers they inspected impressed Miranda - the Kiev and Taurida Regiments 'could not have been better'. Then the party visited Potemkin's mint at the old slave-market at Kaffa, run by his Jewish merchant Zeitlin, and his new town of Theo- dosia.

Serenissimus occupied every night and every carriage-ride with political and artistic discussions with his companions, ranging from the virtues of Murillo to the sins of the Inquisition. The three companions in the Potemkin carriage got on well, perhaps too well, so the Prince entertained himself by provoking a row between Nassau and Miranda. Potemkin baited the Franco- German Nassau by attacking the French for their ingratitude to Russia. The Venezuelan joined in. Nassau was enraged and told Miranda that Spanish women were all prostitutes and most were infected with venereal diseases. Indeed when he met the notorious Duchess of Alba, a Spaniard immediately warned him that she was 'infested'. This incensed Miranda, and the two argued over whose nation was more poxed. No doubt Potemkin enjoyed all this hugely and the journey passed all the more quickly.¹⁴

On the 20th, Potemkin's party set off across the steppes back to Kherson: as usual they travelled all night through the isthmus and rested for breakfast at Perekop, where Miranda admired one of Potemkin's new breed of lambs. It was so cold, the travellers' faces were frozen. 'They rubbed snow and fat on them which is the treatment used here.' Bauer, Potemkin's adjutant, awaited them. He had made it from Tsarskoe Selo in seven and a half days to announce that the Empress was on her way to rendezvous with Potemkin at Kiev.¹⁵

At 11 o'clock on the freezing morning of 7 January, fourteen carriages, 124 sledges (and forty reserves) set off from Tsarskoe Selo to the sound of cannon salutes. Five hundred and sixty horses awaited them at each post. Catherine's entourage of twenty-two consisted of her senior courtiers and Segur, Cobenzl and Fitzherbert, the ambassadors of France, Austria and England. All were wrapped in bearskins and sable bonnets. They were accompanied by hundreds of servants, including twenty footmen, thirty washerwomen, silver polishers, apothecaries, doctors and blackamoors.

The Empress's carriage, drawn by ten horses and lined with cushioned benches and carpets, was so cavernous that a man could stand up in it. It was a six-seater. Every seat mattered.[67] On that first day, it bore the Empress herself, 'Redcoat' Mamonov, Lady-in-Waiting Protosova, Master of the Horse Naryshkin, Chief Chamberlain Shuvalov and Cobenzl. The key to the bone- jolting royal travel of those days was to fight boredom without offending diplomacy. So, every other day, Shuvalov and Naryshkin swapped places with Segur and Fitzherbert,¹⁶ whom Catherine called her 'Pocket Ministers'.¹⁷ Each knew that they were about to witness the spectacle of a lifetime.

When it got dark at 3 p.m., the carriages and sledges rushed along icy lanes through the cold winter nights illuminated by bonfires of cypresses, birch and fir, on both sides of the road, to form 'avenues of fire brighter than daylight'. Potemkin had ordered them to be stoked night and day. The Empress tried to follow the same routine as she did in Petersburg, rising at 6 a.m., then working. She breakfasted with her 'Pocket Ministers' before resuming the journey at 9 a.m., halting at 2 p.m. for dinner, then travelling until 7 p.m. Everywhere there were palaces prepared for her: their stoves were so piping- hot that Segur was 'more alarmed at the heat... than the cold outside'. There were cards and conversation until 9 p.m., when the Empress withdrew to work until bedtime. Segur enjoyed the experience, though none of his risque jokes were tolerated; the melancholy Fitzherbert, feeling liverish and leaving a Russian mistress behind, was bored. He complained to Jeremy Bentham about 'the same furniture, same victuals': it was 'only St Petersburg carried up and down the empire'.¹⁸ While she settled down with 'Redcoat' in her palace, the ambassadors were as likely to find themselves in a fetid peasant cottage as in a manorhouse.¹⁹

Heading south-west towards Kiev, the foreigners observed traditional Russia: 'a quarter of an hour before Her Majesty comes up to them', the peasants 'lay themselves flat on the ground and rise again a quarter of an hour after we have passed'/⁰ Crowds gathered to welcome the Empress but, like Frederick the Great, she disdained their admiration: 'They'd come out in crowds to watch a bear too.'²¹ The Empress passed through Potemkin's estate, Krichev, and Jeremy Bentham saw her progress down the main street, 'edged with branches of firs and other evergreens, and illuminated with tar barrels'.²² There were balls every day, everywhere: 'that's how we travel', she boasted to Grimm.²³

On 29 January, she arrived at Kiev, where the Court was to reside for three months until the ice on the Dnieper melted. A 'multitude of travellers from all parts of Europe' awaited her - including Ligne.²⁴ The roads to Kiev were jammed with grandees. 'I have never in my life met with so much gaiety, so much charm and wit,' wrote a Polish noblewoman on her way to court Catherine and Potemkin.[68] 'Our little dinners in these squalid Jewish inns are quite exquisite ... If one closes one's eyes, one imagines oneself in Paris.'²⁵

Catherine received this letter from Potemkin in the Crimea: 'Here the greenery in the meadows is starting to break through. I think the flowers are coming soon ... I pray to God that this land will be lucky enough to please you, my foster-mother. That is the source of all my happiness. Goodbye, my dear Matushka.'²⁶

Accompanied by music and the bickering of his companions about national venereal customs, Potemkin travelled day and night, 'at the speed of the devil' according to Nassau, to reach Kremenchuk.²⁷ Regardless of the vast responsibilities on his shoulders, with emperors, kings and half the courtiers in Europe converging to view his works, the Prince appeared to spend his days listening to concerts. 'We had music and more music,' marvelled Miranda - hornplayers one day, a Sarti oratorio the next, a Ukrainian choir, then more Boccherini quartets. But beneath the nonchalance Potemkin must have been working and biting his nails like never before. Not everything was perfect: two days after Catherine arrived in Kiev, he inspected ten squadrons of Dragoons. 'It was horrible,' noted Miranda. 'PP was not very happy.' Another squadron of Cuirassiers near Poltava was too much of a mess to be inspected at all.

As the Empress waited in Kiev, the Prince's arrangements accelerated with the unpredictability that was his only rhythm. He ordered Nassau and Miranda to meet the Empress with him. On 4 February, after inspecting troops and attending parties, Potemkin met the exiled Moldavian Hospodar, Alexander Mavrocordato, who had just been deposed by the Turks contrary to the spirit of Kuchuk-Kainardzhi - a reminder of the rising tension between Russia and the Sublime Porte.

Miranda rushed to get courtier's suits made. When he got home, he found his servant had procured him a Russian girl 'who owes nothing in bed to the most lascivious Andalusian'. Next morning, an adjutant announced that Potemkin had left in a kibitka at 5 a.m. 'without saying anything to anybody'. At 3 p.m., Nassau and Miranda set off in pursuit, each in their own kibitka capsule. They never caught up of course, because no one had reduced the hours of eighteenth-century travel to such a fine art as Potemkin. The snow was soft. The sledges got stuck or overturned. New horses were ordered. There were delays of hours. When Miranda arrived at the Kiev customs two days later, he found that Nassau had commandeered Potemkin's messages - typical of that unscrupulous intriguer. 'What a mess,' wrote Miranda.²⁸

Kiev, on the right bank of the Dnieper, was a 'Graeco-Scythian' vision of 'ruins, convents, churches, unfinished palaces', an ancient Russian city fallen on hard times.²⁹ When everyone had arrived, there were three luxurious tableaux-, first, 'the eye was astonished to see, all at one time, a sumptuous court, a conquering Empress, a rich and quarrelsome nobility, proud and luxurious princes and grandees' and all the peoples of the Empire: Don Cossacks, Georgian princes, Kirghiz chieftains and 'savage Kalmyks, true image of the Huns'. Segur called it a 'magical theatre that seemed to confuse and mix antiquity with modern times, civilization and barbarism'.³⁰

Cobenzl's house was like a gentleman's club for the foreigners, though the other two 'Pocket Ministers' each had a little mansion of his own. There were French, Germans, lots of Poles and some Americans, including the diminutive and aptly named Lewis Littlepage, recently appointed chamberlain to Stan­islas-Augustus, King of Poland. Aged twenty-five, this Virginian gentleman and friend of George Washington had fought the British at Gibraltar and Minorca, and was an enthusiastic amateur actor-producer, who staged the Polish premiere of the Barber of Seville at Nassau's house. Now he became Stanislas-Augustus' eyes at the Court of Potemkin.³¹ The doyen of these foreigners was the Prince de Ligne - 'affectionate with his equals, popular with his inferiors, familiar with princes and even sovereigns, he put everyone at their ease'. Not everyone was so charmed by charm itself: Miranda found him a nauseating flatterer.³²

Then there was the Court of Potemkin. That coenobite moved directly into the massive monastery of the Caves, half-church, half-fortress, a sepulchral medieval labyrinth of subterranean halls, churches with twenty-one domes, and troglodyte cells, many of them cut into the caves beneath the city. Seventy- five saints lay undecayed in silk, cool in their catacombs. When Potemkin received his courtiers there, it seemed 'one entered an audience with the vizier of Constantinople, Baghdad or Cairo. Silence and a sort of fear ruled there.' The Prince appeared at Court in his marshal's uniform, clanking with medals and diamonds, laced, powdered and buckled; but at his monastery he stretched out on a divan in his favourite pelisse, thick hair uncombed, pre­tending to be 'too busy playing chess to notice' his Court of Polish princelings and Georgian tsareviches. Segur worried he would be mocked for exposing the dignity of the King of France to such hauteur, 'so this was the way I played it...'. When Potemkin did not even raise his eyes from the chessboard, Segur approached him, took his leonine head in his hands, embraced him and sat down casually beside him on the sofa. In private, Serenissimus dropped his haughtiness and was his old cheerful self,³³ surrounded by nieces Branicka and Skavronskaya, Nassau, Miranda and his composer Sarti, 'dressed as a

ridiculous macaroni'. He cherished his dear friend Segur 'like a child'.[69]

Kiev became the Russian capital. Even Ligne was amazed at the sights: 'Good Heavens! What a retinue! What noise! What a quantity of diamonds, gold stars and orders! How many chains, ribbons, turbans and red caps brimmed with furs or sharp-pointed!'³⁴ Potemkin took his guests, Miranda and Nassau, on a roving debauch of card games, dinners and dances. The nieces were more than ever treated like grand duchesses: at Branicka's house, where ambassadors and Russian ministers gathered, Miranda could barely believed the 'wealth and magnificence' of the Polish 'kinglets' like Potocki and Sapieha.³⁵

On 14 February, Potemkin had Miranda presented to the Empress. She was taken with his machismo, questioning him about the Inquisition, of which he claimed to be a victim. From then on, Miranda was included in Catherine's intimate circle as well as Potemkin's. Soon he was rather blase. 'Whist with the usual people,' he wrote. Nassau complained to his wife that the stakes were a 'bit expensive - 200 roubles'. What did he expect if he played with the Empress and Serenissimus? Most evenings ended in relaxed decadence at Lev Naryshkin's - just like in Petersburg.³⁶

There was the usual fascination with Catherine's and Potemkin's sex lives. The ambassadors scribbled reports back to their Courts and all the travellers recorded anything they could glean. Catherine was always accompanied by Mamonov, who 'owes his fortune to Prince Potemkin and knows it', according to Nassau, but this did not prevent false rumours about Miranda. 'Nothing escaped his penetration, not even the Empress of all the Russias,' claimed a young, envious American diplomat, Stephen Sayre, 'a mortifying declaration for me to make who was 21 months in her capital without ever making myself acquainted with the internal parts of her extensive and well known dominions.'³⁷

The soi-disant 'Countess' Sevres, escorted by Mademoiselle Guibald, began the Kiev sojourn in possession of Potemkin's 'momentary adoration'. Then there were his two nieces, but Sevres was soon replaced as 'favourite sultana' by a Naryshkina,³⁸ who was admired by Miranda at one of Naryshkin's fetes. The Empress dined there. 'There were games and music with dancing.' Catherine played whist with Potemkin, Segur and Mamonov and then sum­moned Miranda to discuss the architecture of Granada. When she left as usual at 10 p.m., the real fun began. Naryshkina danced a Cossack jig then a Russian one, 'which was more lascivious', thought Miranda, 'than our fandango ... what a good dancer ... what a soft movement of the shoulders and back! She could raise the dead!'

Serenissimus evidently shared Miranda's admiration for her resurrectory talents for he spent 'an hour tete-a-tete with Mademoiselle M. Nari ... to persuade her of some political affair'. Miranda could hear her 'giving sights' and exclaiming 4f that was truer to Potemkin's stories.³⁹ A dubious source also claimed that Potemkin pounced on Zakhar Chernyshev's daughter right outside Catherine's rooms.[70] The girl screamed, waking up Catherine. This is unlikely since he was hardly short of female company.⁴⁰

The Prince's entourage, including Miranda and Nassau, lodged with him at the Monastery - but none behaved like monks. Kiev buzzed with mer­riment - a bonanza for the whores of the Ukraine. Miranda and Kiselev, one of Potemkin's adjutants, 'went to the house of a Jewish woman of Polish descent who had very good girls and offered the best tonight', but when they returned after the afternoon at Field-Marshal Rumiantsev-Zadunaisky's, 'I only found a very average Polish woman.' Miranda was surprised that even the girls in Ukrainian provinces wore French fashions: 'God damn it! How far has hellish Gallic frivolity contaminated the human race?' There was such competition for Kiev's overworked horizontales between different courtiers that, just as Miranda and Potemkin's adjutant turned up, Catherine's young chamberlains arrived in force and hogged all the girls. Miranda was furious: he took his pleasures seriously. Finally he found his Polish-Jewish procuress, but, when he tried to explain to the pander what services Kiselev desired, the Russian officer too became angry. 'Oh, how difficult it is for men to act liberally in matters of love and sexual preference!', grumbled Miranda. The two Lotharios had better luck a few days later at a house with an eighteen- year-old courtesan and her maid. Kiselev tackled the maid. Miranda 'tried to conquer the mistress who in the end agreed on three ducats (she wanted ten)'. He stayed happily 'with my nymph in bed ... she was very good and I enjoyed it', but perhaps not as much as he wished: 'she did not let me put it in'. Early next morning: 'Holy Thursday. We attended a solemn mass in the Church of Pechersky with the Empress present ...'. Such, from Polish-Jewish trolls to solemn imperial mass, was life in Kiev.⁴¹

There was seething intrigue behind the pleasure-seeking. The ambassadors tried to learn what was really happening, but 'political secrets remained concealed between Catherine, Prince Potemkin and Count Bezborodko'. When Segur announced that in faraway Paris Louis XVI had called the fatal Assembly of Notables, the first step towards the French Revolution, the Empress congratulated him. 'Everybody's mind was secretly stirred up by liberal sentiments, the desire for reform.' Catherine and Potemkin talked reform but understood the ominous signs in Paris. 'We're not impressed,' Catherine told Grimm, promising that Potemkin would send him some 'Dervish music'.⁴¹

Icy realities were manifested in the presence there of the richest and most restless of Poland's overmighty 'kinglets'. 'Half Poland is here,' Catherine told Grimm. The Empress was in the process of arranging to meet her ex- lover from the 1750s, King Stanislas-Augustus of Poland. Potemkin decided to see him first in order to discuss the agenda for the summit with Catherine. Serenissimus was continuing to cultivate Poland as a personal insurance policy as well as increasingly conducting Russian policy there. He had that special Smolensk szlachta sympathy for Poland from his childhood, but his two immediate aims were to build up a personal position as a Polish magnate and to win Polish support for the coming war against the Turks.

Polish affairs were so complex and unstable that Potemkin remained uncommitted to any one policy, preferring to move in mysterious and flexible ways. He conducted at least three policies simultaneously. He continued to run the pro-Russian Polish party, which was hostile to King Stanislas-Augustus, around his nephew Branicki and a camarilla of magnates.⁴³

In late 1786, he began to pursue a second policy - the purchase of huge estates in Poland itself, made possible by his indigenat of 1775. (He had sold some Russian estates in 1783 and was about to sell the Krichev complex.) Now he told Miranda that he had just bought Polish estates that extended over 300,000 acres and cost two million roubles.⁴⁴ The rumour went round Kiev that these estates contained 300 villages and 60,000 souls.⁴⁵ In late 1786, the Prince made a complicated deal with Prince Ksawery Lubomirski to buy the massive Smila and Meschiricz estates on the right bank of the Dnieper in the triangle of the Polish Palatinate of Kiev that jutted into Russian territory. Smila alone was so extensive that, at his death, it contained 112,000 male souls, giving it a total population the size of a small eighteenth-century city. It had its own baronial Court, its own judicial system and even a private army.⁴⁶

He bought the estates with his own money, but it all derived from the Treasury in one way or another and he regarded this purchase as an imperial, as well as a private, enterprise. Lubomirski was already one of the main contractors of timber for Potemkin's Black Sea Fleet, so he was buying his own suppliers to create a semi-private, semi-imperial conglomerate.⁴⁷ But there was more to it than that: the deal made Potemkin a Polish magnate in his own right - the foundations of his own private principality outside Russia. It was also a form of privatized annexation of Polish territory - and a Trojan Horse that would give him the right to penetrate Polish institutions. Catherine had tried to give Potemkin the Duchy of Courland and the new Kingdom of Dacia, if not the crown of Poland itself. 'From his newly bought lands in Poland,' she commented in Kiev to her secretary, 'Potemkin will perhaps make a tertium quid independent of both Russia and Poland.' She understood the danger of Paul's accession to her dear consort - but it also made her uneasy. Later that year, he explained to her that he had bought these lands 'to become a landowner and to gain the right to enter both their affairs and their military command'.⁴⁸ Like everything connected with Poland, the Smila purchase proved to be a quagmire, igniting a series of court cases and family arguments among the Lubomirskis that embroiled Potemkin in four years of negotiations and litigation.⁴⁹

King Stanislas-Augustus represented the third strand of Potemkin's Polish policy. While undermining him with Branicki and his land purchases, Pot­emkin had always had a soft spot for Stanislas-Augustus, that powerless aesthete and overly sincere patron of the Enlightenment: their correspondence was warmer than just diplomatic courtesy, at least on Potemkin's side. The Prince believed that a treaty with Stanislas-Augustus would buy Polish support against the Turks and keep Poland in the Russian sphere of influence and out of the greedy paws of Prussia. Personally, Potemkin could then command Polish troops as a magnate. All this could be most easily achieved through King Stanislas-Augustus.

The Poles themselves were in Kiev to undermine their own king before the meeting with Catherine, and win Serenissimus' favour.⁵⁰ These first-rank Polish are humble and sycophantic before Prince Potemkin,' observed Miranda at a dinner at the Branickis'. Politics and adultery were the under­currents, as all the Poles 'tricked themselves, and were tricked, or tricked others, all very amiable, less so it is true than their wives ...'. Indeed their entire display was to raise their prestige in the eyes of Potemkin, 'but his glance is hard to catch', joked Ligne, 'since he has only one eye and is short­sighted'.⁵¹

Potemkin demonstrated his power by favouring one Pole and humiliating another. Everyone was jealous of Potemkin's attention. Ligne, Nassau and Lewis Littlepage intrigued with the Poles on behalf of their masters. Branicki envied Nassau, because the latter was staying with Potemkin - and therefore was 'master of the field of battle.'⁵² Branicki and Felix Potocki tried to persuade Potemkin that Stanislas-Augustus opposed his land acquisitions, which had understandably caused some unease in Warsaw.⁵³ Alexandra Bran­icka was already so close to the Empress that Polish gossip claimed she was her natural daughter.⁵⁴ The Prince was irritated by Branicki's bungling intrigues, so there was a 'terrible scene', which made Alexandra ill.⁵⁵ Yet he had Branicki and Felix Potocki received warmly by the Empress, while she 'did not even cast a glance' at his critics, Ignacy Potocki and Prince Sapieha.⁵⁶

Even Miranda managed to become caught up in this Polish game. He greeted the Prince in front of some Polish magnates without standing up. Miranda should have known that royalty, of whom Potemkin was by now almost one, are touchy about etiquette. Strangers could never take Potemkin's favour for granted. Rumours that Miranda was neither a Spanish count nor a colonel may have also played some part in this cooling. Potemkin gave him the icy treatment.⁵⁷

In early March, the Prince, accompanied by Nassau, Branicki and Stack- elberg, the Russian Ambassador to Warsaw, travelled the twenty-eight miles to Chwastow to meet the King of Poland, who nervously awaited his rendez­vous with Catherine after so many years.⁵⁸ Potemkin wore the uniform of a Polish szlachta of the Palatinate of Bratslav and his Polish orders. He treated the King, accompanied by Littlepage, like his own monarch. The two men agreed on Potemkin's suggestion of a Russo-Polish treaty against the Otto­mans. Serenissimus let Stackelberg sound out Stanislas-Augustus on his plans to set himself up in a feudal principality at Smila. The King responded that he wanted Russian agreement on reforming the Polish constitution. Potemkin denounced Ignacy Potocki as 'a sceleraf - a fossil, Felix Potocki was 'a fool', but Branicki was really not a bad fellow.⁵⁹ Potemkin was 'enchanted' by the King⁶⁰ - 'for at least a moment'.⁶¹ The coming meeting with Catherine was confirmed.

Back in Kiev two days later, Miranda awaited Potemkin's return nervously. But the Prince, whose sulks never lasted long, greeted him like a long-lost friend: 'it seems a century since we last saw each other', he boomed.⁶¹ As Catherine's departure got closer, it was time to leave Miranda behind. The Empress, via Mamonov, offered him Russian service, but he revealed his hopes for a Venezuelan revolt against Spain. Catherine and Potemkin were sympathetic to this anti-Bourbon project. 'If the Inquisition is so necessary, then they should appoint Miranda as Inquisitor,' joked Potemkin. Catherine offered him the use of all Russian missions abroad and he cheekily requested 10,000 roubles of credit. Mamonov told Miranda that Serenissimus would have to approve, more evidence of Catherine's and Potemkin's near equality. Potemkin agreed. On 22 April, the future (if short-lived) dictator of Venezuela took his leave of Empress and Prince. The Spanish caught up with Francisco de Miranda in the end. Later that year in Petersburg, the two Bourbon ambassadors threatened to withdraw unless the fake Count-Colonel was expelled. In the end, he never got the full 10,000 roubles - but he did keep in contact with Potemkin: the archives reveal that he sent him a telescope from London as a present.⁶³

Just as everyone was getting exceptionally tired of Kiev, which Catherine called 'abominable',⁶⁴ artillery salvoes announced that the ice had melted and the show could begin. At midday on 22 April 1787, the Empress embarked on her galley in the most luxurious fleet ever seen on a great river.

2-4

CLEOPATRA

The barge she sat in, like a burnish'd throne, Burn'd on the water, the poop was beaten gold, Purple the sails, and so perfumed, that The winds were lovesick with them, the oars were silver Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made The water which they beat to follow faster, As amorous of their strokes. For her own person, It beggar'd all description...

William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra

At midday on 22 April 1787, Catherine, Potemkin and their entourage boarded the dining barge, where a feast for fifty was laid out. At 3 p.m., the fleet moved off. The seven imperial galleys of the Prince's sublime fleet were elegant, comfortable and majestic, painted in gold and scarlet on the outside, decorated in gold and silk inside, propelled and served by 3,000 oarsmen, crew and guards, and attended by over eighty other boats.¹ Each had its own orchestra, always on deck, which played as the guests embarked or disembarked. On Catherine's barge, the Dnieper, the orchestra was conducted by Potemkin's maestro, Sarti. Her boudoir had twin beds for her and Mamonov. Each barge had a communal drawing room, library, music-room and canopy on deck. The sumptuous bedroom suites were hung with Chinese silk, with beds in taffeta; the studies had mahogany writing-tables, a com­fortable chintz-covered divan and even lavatories with their own water- supply, a novelty on land let alone on the Dnieper. The floating dining-hall could seat seventy.

The dazzling, almost mythical, memory of this cruise remained with all its guests for the rest of their lives. 'A multitude of sloops and boats hovered unceasingly at the head and sides of the fleet which looked like something out of a fairy-tale,' remembered Segur. Onlookers gave 'thundering acclam­ations as they saw the sailors of her majestic squadron rhythmically dip their painted oars into the waters of the Dnieper to the roar of the guns'. It was like 'Cleopatra's fleet ... never was there a more brilliant and agreeable voyage', thought Ligne. 'It's true', Nassau told his wife, 'that our gathering on this galley is one of the most unique things ever seen.'

The Prince presented a perpetual spectacle along the riverside: as they set off to cannon salvoes and symphonies, small squadrons of Cossacks manoeuvred over the plains. 'Towns, villages, country houses and sometimes rustic huts were so wonderfully adorned and disguised with garlands of flowers and splendid architectural decorations that they seemed to be trans­formed before our eyes into superb cities, palaces suddenly sprang up and magically created gardens.'

Potemkin's barge, the Bug, housed himself, his nieces, their husbands and Nassau-Siegen. The tedium of Kiev was left behind, but the malice and mischief cruised down the Dnieper with them. 'I love being with the Prince, who really likes me,' Nassau told his wife, 'despite my companions who loathe me.' Later he made friends with Branicki. The ex-lover of the Queen of Tahiti and almost-King of Ouidah drew a picture for his wife of their living quarters on the 'big and ornate' barge: Potemkin occupied the largest suite and no one could reach their rooms without passing through his salon. Catherine's first rendezvous was with the King of Poland five days downriver, and Potemkin's barge was a floating confederation of Polish intrigues. Nassau, still on his mission for Stanislas-Augustus against Branicki and trying to make his fortune, always awoke early and roused Potemkin to get him on his own.

The mornings were free. At midday, the Empress's galley fired a cannon to announce dinner, sometimes for only ten guests, who were rowed over. Afterwards, Nassau was conveyed to the barge of Ligne and Segur, where the former would read out his diaries. At 6 p.m., it was back to the Empress's boat for supper. She always retired at 9 p.m. and 'everyone goes to Prince Potemkin's'. But, despite this unprecedented pomp, the tour was intimate. One night, Mamonov, bored with his early imperial lights-out, asked Nassau and some others to stay for a game of whist. Scarcely had they begun to play in Catherine's salon than she entered with her hair down, holding her bed bonnet and wearing an apricot-coloured taffeta dressing gown with blue ribbons. This was a unique glimpse of how the older Catherine looked to her young lovers behind bedroom doors. 'Having her hair uncovered makes her look younger,' remarked Nassau. She hoped she was not disturbing them, sat down, excused her 'deshabille' and was 'very cheerful'. She retired at 10 p.m. The whist ended at 1.30 a.m.

'The journey is truly a continual party and absolutely superb,' Nassau reported. 'A charming society because Ligne and Segur make it great.' The pair, who shared the Sejm, were to become the naughty schoolboys of the tour, always up to horseplay. Every morning, Ligne knocked on the thin partition separating their bedrooms to recite impromptu poems to Segur and then sent over his page with letters of 'wisdom, folly, politics, pretty speeches, military anecdotes and philosophical epigrams'. Nothing could have been stranger than this sunrise correspondence 'between an Austrian general and a French ambassador lying side by side on the same barge, not far from the empress of the North, sailing down the Dnieper, through Cossack country, to visit the Tartars'. Segur thought the visions of the cruise almost poetical: The beautiful wealth, the magnificence of our fleet, the majesty of the river, the movement, the joy of countless spectators along the riverside, the military and Asiatic mixture of costumes of thirty different nations, finally the certainty of seeing new things each day, stirred and sharpened our imagination.' The sheer success of these spectacles reflected on the magnificent showman: The elements, seasons, nature and art all seemed to conspire to assure the triumph of this powerful favourite.'¹

After three days of Cleopatran cruising, the King of Poland, Stanislas- Augustus, touched with romantic memories and political panaceas, waited at Kaniev on the Polish bank to meet the Empress. There was pathos in this meeting: when they had last met, he was a young Polish dreamer and she the oppressed wife of an imbecilic bully. Now he was a king and she an empress. He had not seen the woman he never really stopped loving for twenty-eight years and had probably indulged himself with fantasies of a reunion. 'You can easily imagine', the King confessed to Potemkin in an unpublished note back in February, 'with what excitement I await the moment which should give me this joy.' It was the sort of doomed sentimentality that would have struck a cord in Potemkin.³

Stanislas-Augustus remained handsome, sensitive, cultured, but above all he wanted to do the best that he could for Poland. Potemkin and Stanislas- Augustus shared interests in opera, architecture and literature, yet the latter could not afford to trust the former. The King's lot was nothing but frustration and humiliation. Politically, he had been dealt the weakest imaginable hand. Personally he was no match for politicians like Potemkin. Catherine found the King's political dilemmas irritating and inept - and his personal sincerity almost unbearable. Perhaps, having once loved him so much in the prison of her miserable marriage, the very thought of her impotent naivety in those times embarrassed her.⁴

The real purpose of the meeting was not amorous nostalgia but the survival of Poland. The sprawling chaos, feeble grandeur, stubborn liberty and laby­rinthine subtleties of the Commonwealth made it the only political issue that confounded Catherine's orderly mind. Yet these were the very conditions in which the serpentine Potemkin flourished. The plan of the King and Prince, sealed at Chwastow, to form an anti-Turkish alliance and reform the Polish constitution, might have prevented the tragedy of Poland's destruction. But this was an occasion where personal awkwardness undermined political understanding.

The flotilla dropped anchor off Kaniev. At 11 a.m. on 25 April, Bezborodko and Prince Bariatinsky, Marshal of the Court, collected the King in a launch. 'Gentlemen, the King of Poland has asked me to commend Count Poniatowski to your care,' he said, assuming his original name, since kings of Poland could not leave Polish soil. When the King met the Empress, Segur and the others formed a circle around them to witness their first words 'in circumstances so different from those in which they first met, united by love, separated by jealousy and pursued by hatred'. But their expectations were immediately crushed. There was no spark now. The monarchs walked stiffly on deck. Probably his surging nostalgia could not resist some painful allusions to the past for, when they returned, she was strained and embarrassed, and there was a 'certain trace of sadness' in his eyes. Some said that she used his blandishments to make Mamonov jealous. 'It was thirty years since I'd seen him,' Catherine wrote afterwards, 'and you can imagine that we found each other changed.'⁵

There was one touching moment, after Stanislas-Augustus awkwardly awarded Potemkin's nephew, Engelhardt, the White Eagle. It was time for dinner. The King looked for his hat. Catherine handed it to him. 'To cover my head twice,' he quipped - the first being his crown. 'Ah, madame, that is too much bounty and goodness.' Stanislas-Augustus rested on another barge, then was rowed to Potemkin's floating residence. Serenissimus tried to rec­oncile the King with Branicki, but the latter behaved so insolently that Stanislas-Augustus left the room. Potemkin rushed after him, apologizing. The Empress and the Prince sharply reprimanded Branicki - but he was family: their Polish creature remained in their entourage.

At 6 p.m., the King returned to Catherine's barge for the political nego­tiations. He proposed the Russo-Polish alliance, strolling on deck. She prom­ised an answer. The Prince himself nonchalantly played cards near by. Catherine was furious that he did not come to her assistance. 'Why did Prince Potemkin and you have to leave us all the time like that?', she berated Ligne. Stanislas-Augustus begged Catherine to come for supper in Kaniev, where he had almost bankrupted his meagre resources by laying on two days of dinners and fireworks, but Catherine snubbed him. She told Potemkin she did not care to do things in a rush as they did in Poland; 'you yourself know any change of my intentions is unpleasant for me'. Potemkin, whether out of respect for Stanislas-Augustus or out of anger with Catherine for ruining his Polish strategy, kept playing cards and saying nothing. Catherine became angrier and quieter. The King got glummer. The courtiers fidgeted and eaves­dropped. 'Prince Potemkin didn't say a word,' Catherine muttered to her secretary the next day. 'I had to talk all the time; my tongue dried up; they almost made me angry by asking me to stay.' Catherine finally deigned to watch Poland's costly fireworks from her barge.

The broken-hearted and humiliated King took his leave. 'Don't look so distressed,' Ligne whispered to him bitchily. 'You're only giving pleasure to a Court which ... detests you.' Catherine remained furious with Potemkin. He sulked on the Bug. She sent him a series of notes: 'I'm angry with you, you're horribly maladroit today.' The flotilla waited to watch the fireworks culminating in a simulated eruption of Vesuvius. Thus the King had, in Ligne's inimitable description, 'been here for three months and spent three million to see the Empress for three hours'. Stanislas-Augustus sent this pathetic note in a semi-legible scrawl to Potemkin a few days later: 'I was pleased when I saw the Empress. I don't know her any more, but although one is sad, I count on having Prince Potemkin as a friend.'⁶

Kaiser Joseph II and Tsarina Catherine II, the Caesars of the East, were getting closer. On 30 April, the flotilla rowed late into Kremenchuk, delayed by a high wind. Joseph, again in incognito as Comte de Falkenstein, waited downriver at Kaidak, bristling with military impatience.

Joseph's despotic but rational reforms had already driven several of his provinces into rebellion. He had not wanted to come to Russia at all, but his presence was the most important for the Russians since the Austrian alliance was their main weapon against the Ottomans. 'Perhaps one can find time', Joseph suggested to Chancellor Kaunitz, 'to find an excuse.' The pompous Habsburg thought Catherine's invitation 'most cavalier' so he told Kaunitz his answer would be 'honest, short but will not refrain from letting this Catherinized Princess of Zerbst know she should put a little more con­sideration ... in disposing of me'. He then accepted enthusiastically. He was keen to inspect Russian military forces but, in his heart, was determined to find they could not do anything properly, unlike his Austrians. He wrote ironically to Potemkin that he looked forward to seeing his 'interesting arrangements and surprising creations'. Now the inspector-maniac consoled himself for the wait by inspecting Kherson on his own.⁷

Catherine fretted - where was Joseph? Cobenzl sent his emperor reassuring letters. Potemkin seemed to live only for the moment - though there were rumours that he was short of horses for the rest of the journey. The Empress landed at Kremenchuk and inspected an elegant palace surrounded, of course, by an 'enchanted English garden' of shady foliage, running water and pear trees. Potemkin had had huge oak trees, 'as broad as himself' joked Ligne, transported from afar and assembled into a wood. William Gould had been there. 'Everything is in flower,' the Empress told Grimm. Catherine then inspected 15,000 troops, including seven regiments of Potemkin's new light cavalry, which Cobenzl acclaimed for its men and horses. After giving a ball for 800 that night, Catherine headed downriver for her imperial reunion.⁸

Just as the boats disappeared down the river, Samuel Bentham, leaving brother Jeremy to manage Krichev, sailed into view with his proudest creation: the six-link state vermicular for Catherine.[71] Among so many wonderful sights, the young Englishman, high on a platform, barking orders through a trumpet, must have provided another. Potemkin ordered him to moor near his barge. Next morning, he inspected it and 'was pleased, as can be', according to Samuel. When the flotilla set off again, Bentham went too. He claimed the Empress noticed his vessels and admired them - but Potemkin was possibly consoling him for missing his moment.

Twenty five miles short of Kaidak, where they were to meet the Emperor, some of the barges ran aground. The flotilla anchored. Potemkin realized they could not go all the way by river. There was a danger that the spectacular would descend into embarrassing chaos: one Empress was grounded; one Emperor was lost; there was a shortage of horses; and the barges containing the food provisions and kitchen grounded on sandbanks. Bentham's 'floating worm' saved the day.

Leaving the Empress behind, Potemkin changed boats and, to Bentham's delight, pushed ahead in the vermicular to find the Emperor. When he got nearer Kaidak, very close to the Sech of the vanquished Zaporogians, he elected to stay on board rather than in one of his local palaces. Next morning, he went off and found Joseph II. That evening, the Emperor returned the compliment on Bentham's vermicular. Bentham was puffed up by the praise of two Caesars and one Prince - but they were much more interested in meeting each other than in viewing ingenious English barges.[72]

Potemkin and Joseph decided that the Emperor would 'surprise' the Empress. Monarchs do not appreciate surprises, so Serenissimus sent a courier hotfoot to warn Catherine, and Cobenzl sent a courier back to warn Joseph that Potemkin had warned her: such are the absurdities of serving kings. On 7 May, Catherine abandoned the barges and proceeded by carriage towards this achingly unspontaneous 'surprise'.⁹

Catherine, accompanied by Ligne, Mamonov and Alexandra Branicka, crossed a field and came 'nose to nose' (in her words) with Joseph, who was with Cobenzl. The two Majesties, reunited in one carriage, then headed the thirty versts to Kaidak. There Joseph was appalled to discover that the kitchens and cooks were far behind on the grounded barges. Potemkin galloped off to make arrangements and forgot to eat. Now the Tsarina and Kaiser were without any hope of food. 'There was no one', Joseph noted, 'to cook or serve.' So much for the Emperor who liked to travel without ceremony. The imperial tour threatened to subside into farce.¹⁰

Potemkin was the master of improvisation just as necessity is the father of invention. 'Prince Potemkin himself became the chef de cuisine,' Catherine laughingly told Grimm, 'Prince de Nassau, the kitchen-boy, and Grand General Branicki, the pastry-maker.' The imbroglio in the kitchen, created by a one-eyed Russian giant, an international lion-slaying paladin and a bewhiskered 'Polish bravo', must have been an alarming but comical glimpse of culinary Hades. Potemkin did manage to present a girandole, a revolving firework spinning round Catherine's initial, surmounted by 4,000 rockets, and yet another exploding volcanic hill. For eighteenth-century royalty, fire­works and ersatz volcanoes must have been as boring as visits to youth centres and factories today. One wonders if it took their mind off Potemkin's cooking: the three mad cooks had indeed spoiled the broth. Catherine thought 'the two Majesties had never been so grandly and badly served' but it was such fun that it was 'as good a dinner as it was bad'. One person - the most important - did not agree.

'The dinner was constructed of uneatable dishes,' the unamused Emperor told Field-Marshal Lacey, but at least 'the company is quite good'. But the Emperor of Schadenfreude was secretly delighted - 'the confusion that reigns on this voyage is unbelievable'. He noticed there were 'more things and people on the boats than the carriages could contain and there aren't horses to carry them'. Joseph, twisted with German superiority over the blundering Russians, was 'curious how it will all succeed in the end', but, he ended with a martyred sigh, 'This will truly be a time of penitence.'¹¹

Joseph drew Ligne aside when he got the opportunity: 'It seems to me these people want war. Are they ready? I don't believe so; in any case, I'm not.' He had already seen Kherson's ships and forts. The Russians were involved in an arms race, but he believed the whole show was 'to throw dust in our eyes. Nothing is solid and all is done in a hurry in the most expensive way.' Joseph could not quite bring himself to admit that he was impressed. He was right if he thought the magnificence of the tour and Potemkin's achievements were moving Catherine towards war. 'We can start it ourselves,' she told her secretary.

Potemkin wanted to discuss the possibility of war with Joseph himself, so one morning he went to see the Emperor and explained Russian grievances and territorial demands against the Ottomans. Potemkin's shyness prevented him saying all he wanted, so he asked Ligne to do it for him. 'I didn't know he wanted so much,' muttered Joseph. 'I thought taking the Crimea would suffice. But what will they do for me if I have war with Prussia one day? We'll see.. Л¹²

Two days later, the two Caesars arrived, in a grand black carriage with Catherine's crest on the doors, a leather ceiling and red velvet seats, at the desolate foundations of Potemkin's grandiose Ekaterinoslav. [73] When the two Majesties laid the foundation stones for the cathedral, Joseph whispered to Segur, 'The Empress has laid the first stone, and I the last.' (He was wrong.) The next day they headed across the steppes, stocked with 'immense herds of sheep, huge numbers of horses',¹³ towards Kherson.

On the 12th, they entered Potemkin's first city in a ceremonial procession through an arch emblazoned with an unmistakable challenge to the Sublime Porte: 'This is the road to Byzantium.'¹⁴ Joseph, who had already inspected the town, now had a chance to inspect Catherine's entourage. 'Prince Pot­emkin alone, mad for music, has 120 musicians with him,' observed the Kaiser, yet 'it took an officer whose hands were horribly burned with gunpowder four days to get help'. As for the Empress's favourite, Joseph thought Mamonov was 'barely intelligent ... a mere child'. He liked Segur, thought Fitzherbert was 'clever' though clearly bored, and praised the 'jockey diplomatique', who possessed of all the wit and joie de vivre the Emperor lacked: 'Ligne is marvellous here and counts well for my interests.' But Joseph's peripatetic inspections and secret jealousy were not lost on the Russians. Catherine rolled her eyes at her secretary: 'I see and hear everything but I don't run around like the Emperor does.' It was no wonder, she thought, he had driven the burghers of Brabant and Flanders to rebel.¹⁵

Segur and Ligne were dazzled by Potemkin's achievements there: 'we could not have prevented our plain astonishment', wrote Segur, 'to see such great new imposing creations'. The fortress was almost finished; there were houses for 24,000; 'several churches of noble architecture'; there were 600 cannons in the Arsenal; 200 merchant ships in the port and two ships-of-the-line and a frigate, ready to launch. The surprise in Catherine's entourage was due to the probably almost universal presumption in Petersburg that Potemkin's achievements were fraudulent. Now Segur said they all recognized the 'talent and activity of Prince Potemkin'. Catherine herself, who had evidently been told by Potemkin's enemies that it was all lies, told Grimm, 'They can say all they like in St Petersburg - the attentions of Prince Potemkin have transformed this land which, at the peace [1774] was not more than a hut, into a flourishing town.' The foreigners realized the port's limitations - 'they've built a lot at Kherson in the short time since its foundation', wrote Joseph, ' - and it shows.'

On the 15th, Catherine and Joseph launched the three warships from three seaside canopies decorated with 'gauze, laces, furbelows, garlands, pearls and flowers', which Ligne thought looked as if 'they had just come from the milliners' shops in the rue St Honore'. One of the ships-of-the-line with eighty guns was named St Joseph in the Kaiser's honour, but he thought the 'wood is so green ... the masts so bad' that they would soon fall to pieces. They did not.¹⁶

Before they departed, there was an ominous moment when Catherine decided she wanted to visit her strategic fortress of Kinburn at the mouth of the Dnieper. But an Ottoman squadron cruised the Liman, so the Empress could not go. The Russians were more aware of Turkish eyes watching them than they let on to foreigners. The Russian Ambassador to the Sublime Porte, Yakov Bulgakov, sailed from Constantinople to discuss Turkish policy. Potemkin teased Segur about the French encouraging the Turks, who had 'good reason to worry'.¹⁷

After Kherson, the two Caesars headed across the bare steppe towards the Crimea. When Segur rashly joked about the deserts, Catherine snapped: 'Why put yourself out Monsieur le Comte. If you fear the boredom of deserts, what prevents you leaving for Paris?'¹⁸

Suddenly the imperial carriage was surrounded by 3,000 Don Cossacks in full regalia, led by their Ataman, in a single row, ready to charge. Among them, there was a squadron of another of Potemkin's favourite steppe horsemen: the ferocious Kalmyks, 'resembling Chinese' thought Nassau. The Cossacks charged and charged again, giving warlike whoops that thrilled Potemkin's guests. Then they split into two halves and fought a battle. Even Joseph was impressed with their force and endurance: they could do sixty versts a day. 'There's no other cavalry in Europe', said Nassau, 'who can do it.'

At Kizikerman,[74] seventy-five versts north-east of Kherson, they came upon a small stone house and an encampment of tents braided with silver, the carpets sprinkled with precious gems. When the Cossack officers were pres­ented to the Empress next morning by Alexandra Branicka, the diplomats were excited by the Ataman's women: his wife wore a long dress like a priest's habit, made of 'a brocade of gold and money'. She wore a sable hat with its base covered in pearls. But Nassau was most taken with the 'four fingers of pearls' that dangled erotically over her cheeks, all the way down to her mouth.¹⁹

At dusk, Joseph and Segur walked out into the flat, apparently endless wasteland, nothing but grass all the way to the horizon. 'What a peculiar land,' said the Holy Roman Emperor. 'And who could have expected to see me with Catherine the Second and the French and English Ambassadors wandering through a Tartar desert? What a page of history!'

'It's more like a page from the Arabian Nights,' replied Segur.

Then Joseph stopped and rubbed his eyes: 'I don't know if I'm awake or whether your remark about the Arabian Nights has made me dream. Look over there!'

A tall tent appeared to be moving towards them, gliding all on its own over the grass. Kaiser and Count peered at this magical sight: it was an encampment of Kalmyks who moved their tents without dismantling them. Thirty Kalmyks came out and surrounded the two men, with no idea that one of them was an emperor. Segur went inside. Joseph preferred to wait outside. When Segur finally emerged, Joseph joked that he was relieved the Frenchman had been released from his 'imprisonment'.²⁰

The Caesars had no sooner passed the Perekop Lines into the Crimea than there was a roar of hooves and a cloud of dust through which galloped 1,200 Tartar cavalry. Potemkin's 'Tartar ambuscade' surrounded the imperial conveyance completely, armed with jewel-encrusted pistols, engraved curved daggers, lances and bows and arrows, as if the travellers had suddenly passed backwards into Europe's dark past.

'Wouldn't it cause uproar in Europe, my dear Segur,' said Ligne, 'if the 1200 Tartars surrounding us decided to gallop us to a small port near by and there embark the noble Catherine and the great Roman Emperor and take them to Constantinople for the amusement and satisfaction of Abdul-Hamid?' Luckily Catherine did not overhear Ligne's musings. A guard of Tartar murzas, sporting green uniforms richly braided with golden stripes, now formed Catherine's personal escort. Twelve Tartar boys served as her pages.¹¹

The carriages and Tartar horsemen seemed to be going faster and faster. They had turned down the steep hill that led to the ancient capital of the Giray Khans: Bakhchisaray. The horses on Catherine and Joseph's eight- seater carriage bolted down the hill. It careered off the road, veering dan­gerously between rocks. The Tartars galloping alongside tried to get control of it. Catherine showed no fear. The Tartars somehow managed to calm the horses, for they stopped, as suddenly as they had bolted, in the Crimean capital."

The Khan's Palace was an eclectic compound of palace, harem and mosque, built by Ukrainian slaves, to the plans of Persian and Italian architects, in Moorish, Arabian, Chinese and Turkish styles, with peculiar Western touches like Gothic chimneys. Its layout was based on the Ottoman palaces of Constantinople, with their gates and courtyards leading inwards into the Khan's residence and his harem. Its courtyards were silent and serene. Tower­ing walls surrounded secret gardens, soothed by the trickle of elaborate fountains. The hints of Western influence and the thickness of the walls reminded Joseph of a closed Carmelite convent. Beside the khans' mosque, with its high minarets, stood the haunting, noble graveyard of the Giray dynasty: two octagonal rotundas were built around the mausoleums of khans in a field of intricately carved gravestones. Sweet scents rose from burning candles beneath the windows. Around the Palace stood a Tartar town with its baths and minarets, in a valley wedged between two sheer cliffs of rock.[75] Potemkin had covered these with burning lanterns so that the travellers really felt they resided in a mythical Arabian palace in the middle of an illuminated amphitheatre.²³

Catherine was staying in the Khan's own apartments, which included the Girays' 'magnificent and eccentric audience chamber' - big and richly ornamented with the defiant Giray declaration that threw down the gauntlet of supremacy to all the dynasties of the East: 'The jealous and envious will have to admit that neither at Ishfan nor Damascus nor Istanbul will they find its equal.' The Habsburg lived in the rooms of a khan's brother. Potemkin, appropriately, lived in the Harem with Ligne, who was captivated by the magic of the place. So was Catherine. The delicious sweet scents of the gardens - orange trees, roses, jasmine, pomegranates - pervaded every apart­ment, each of which had a divan round its walls and a fountain in the middle. At Catherine's dinners, she received the local muftis, whom she treated respectfully. She was inspired by the imams calling the faithful to prayer five times a day outside her window to write a bad, if rhyming, poem to Potemkin: 'Isn't this a place for paradise? My praise to you, my friend.'

After dinner, Joseph rode off to inspect the nearby Chufut Kale, home of the eighth-century Karaite Jewish sect that rejected the Talmud, believed only in the original Torah and lived in joyous isolation in abandoned castles on Crimean mountaintops. Back in Bakhchisaray, Nassau, Segur and Ligne explored the town, like schoolboys on an exeat. Ligne, despite being twenty years older than Segur, was the most mischievous, hoping to spot a Tartar girl without her face covered. But that alluring prospect would have to wait. Back in the Harem, Potemkin reclined to watch 'Arab dancers', who, according to Nassau-Siegen, 'did disgusting dances'.²⁴ After just two nights in Bakhchisaray, the Caesars set off at 9 a.m. on 22 May, surrounded by pages, Tartars and Don Cossacks, to view Potemkin's greatest show of all.

Tsarina and Kaiser were dining splendidly in a pretty palace built on the Heights of Inkerman on a spit of land that jutted out over the sea. Potemkin's orchestra played. The hillsides swarmed with jousting and charging Tartar cavalry. Serenissimus gave a sign. The curtains were drawn back, the doors thrown open on to a balcony. As the monarchs peered out, a squadron of Tartar cavalry in mid-skirmish cantered aside to reveal 'the magnificent sight' that took their breath away.

The amphitheatre of mountains formed a deep and glittering bay. In the midst of it, a numerous and formidable fleet - at least twenty ships-of-the- line and frigates, thought Joseph - stood at anchor, in battle order, facing the very place where the monarchs dined. At another hidden signal from the Prince, the fleet saluted in unison with all its guns: the very sound, remembered Segur, seemed to announce that the Russian Empire had arrived in the south and that Catherine's 'armies could within 30 hours ... plant her flags on the walls of Constantinople'. Nassau said the moment was 'almost magical'. This was the naval base of Sebastopol founded three years before. Potemkin had built this entire fleet in just two.

As soon as the guns were silent, Catherine was stimulated by this vision of raw Russian power to rise and offer an emotional toast to her 'best friend', looking at Joseph without naming him."" One can imagine Joseph cringing at her passion, sneering jealously at the Russian success, itching to inspect it himself. Fitzherbert remained utterly phlegmatic.²⁵ All eyes turned to Pot­emkin: it was his achievement, a remarkable feat given the sloth of Russian 374 ^the apogee

officialdom, the breadth of his responsibilities, the lack of Russian naval expertise, and the distance from the nearest timber in faraway Poland. The Russians present must have thought of Peter the Great's conquest of the Baltic and the foundation of the Russian fleet there. Which courtier would say it first? 'Madam,' said Segur, 'by creating Sebastopol, you have finished in the south what Peter the Great began in the north.' Nassau embraced Potemkin and then asked to kiss the Empress's hand. She refused. 'It's Prince Potemkin to whom I owe everything,' she said again and again. 'So you must embrace him.' Then she turned laughingly to her dear consort. 'I hope no one is going to say that he's lazy any more,' she said, warning against any hint that his achievements were not real. Potemkin kissed her hands and was so moved that his eyes filled with tears/⁶

Serenissimus led the Tsarina and Emperor down to a landing-stage and on to a rowing-boat, which set off towards Sebastopol and the new fleet. The rest followed in a second sloop. They passed right under the bows of three sixty-six-gun ships-of-the-line, three frigates of fifty guns and ten of forty guns, which saluted the Empress in three more salvoes; sailors cheered her. They disembarked at a stone staircase that led straight up to the Admiralty, where she was staying. Around them was the new city of Sebastopol, 'the most beautiful port I have seen', Joseph wrote. At last, he was full of admiration: '150 ships were there ... ready for all events of the sea.' The port was defended by three batteries. There were houses, shops, two hospitals, and barracks. Cobenzl estimated there would soon be twelve ships-of-the-line. Even Joseph admitted they were 'very well built'. It seemed impossible to Segur that Potemkin had done this in such a short time. Everything was well done where only three years earlier there had been nothing. 'One must do justice to Prince Potemkin,' Catherine wrote that day to Grimm in Paris. 'The Empress', noted Joseph, 'is totally ecstatic ... Prince Potemkin is at the moment all-powerful and feted beyond imagination.'

The Caesars and the Prince thought of war. Catherine and Potemkin felt that they could beat the Turks on the spot. The Empress asked Nassau if he thought her ships were equal to the Ottoman ones at Ochakov. Nassau replied that the Russian vessels could put the Turkish fleet in their pocket if they liked. 'Do you think I dare?', she smiled at Ligne with chilling flirtatiousness. Russia was ready for war, Potemkin 'ceaselessly' told Ligne. If it was not for France, 'we'd begin immediately'.

'But your cannons and munitions are so new,' said Ligne, restraining him on behalf of his Kaiser.

'Everything is there,' replied Serenissimus. 'All I have to do is say to 100,000 men - March!'

Catherine kept her head enough to order Bulgakov to send the Sultan a reassuring note. Neither she nor Potemkin were as warlike as they appeared. Nonetheless, the 'Pocket Ministers', the Sublime Porte and the chancelleries of Europe could have been forgiven for believing that Russia was chomping at the bit/⁷

Catherine retired to talk alone with the overawed Emperor about the timing of war. Potemkin joined them, emphasizing his semi-royal status. Joseph urged caution, citing France and Prussia. Frederick William of Prussia (Frederick the Great had died in 1786) was 'too mediocre' to stop them, claimed Catherine. France will make 'a lot of noise', agreed Potemkin, but 'end up taking part of the cake'. He suggested that France swallow Egypt and Candia (Crete) in the coming carve-up. Besides, added the Empress threateningly, 'I'm strong enough, it suffices that you won't prevent it.' Joseph, terrified of being left out, assured them Russia could count on Austria.²⁸ Little did any of them realize that the same debate - war or peace - was simultaneously raging, beside the same sea, one day's sailing away, in the Divan of the Sublime Porte. The canaille of Constantinople were rioting for war, as thousands of soldiers marched through the streets on their way to the fortresses of the Black Sea and the Balkans.

Joseph invited the diplomats to trot around Sebastopol to discuss the enigma of Potemkin in private. The ability of this exotic eccentric to achieve so much confounded the Emperor. Potemkin was all the more 'extraordinary for his genius for activity', he told Nassau. 'In spite of his bizarreness', Joseph declared to Segur, 'that unique man' was not only 'useful but necessary' to control a barbaric people like the Russians. Joseph yearned to find some fault, so he suggested to Nassau, who had commanded at sea, that the ships were surely not ready to sail. 'They are ready and entirely armed,' replied the paladin. Joseph for once had to admit defeat: 'The truth is that it is necessary to be here to believe what I see.'²⁹

Nassau and Ligne rode off, escorted by Cossacks and Tartars, to inspect Partheniza and Massandra, the estates given to them by the Prince. Partheniza, Ligne's property, was supposedly the site of the Temple of Diana, where Iphigenia was sacrificed. Ligne was so moved that he wrote a poem to Potemkin. The guests visited the ruins of the ancient city of Khersoneses. Serenissimus headed for the hills for a day taking Nassau up to relax at an estate so fine he called it 'Tempted'.³⁰

2-5

THE AMAZONS

Assemblage etonnant des dons de la nature Qui joignez la genie a Tame le plus pure Delicat et sensible a la voix de Phonneur Tendre, compatissant, et rempli de candeur Aimable, gai, distrait, pensif et penseur sombre De ton charmant, ce dernier trait est l'ombre Apprends-moi par quel art, tout se trouve en ta tete?

The Prince de Ligne's poem to Prince Potemkin, written on the Crimean journey

A regiment of Amazons rode out to meet the Kaiser when he pushed ahead to inspect Balaclava. Joseph was astonished by this trick of Potemkinian show­manship. The Prince's Greek, or 'Albanian', military colony there already sported a neo-Classical costume - breastplates and cloaks, along with modern pistols. These Amazons were 200 female' Albanese', all 'pretty women', accord­ing to Ligne, wearing skirts of crimson velvet, bordered with gold lace and fringe, green velvet jackets, also bordered with gold, white gauze turbans, spangles and white ostrich feathers. They were armed to the teeth 'with muskets, bayonets and lances, Amazonian breastplates and long hair gracefully platted'. This caprice originated in a discussion between Catherine and Potemkin, in Peters­burg before the trip, about the similarities between modern and Classical Greeks. He praised the courage of his Greeks and their wives. Catherine, no feminist, doubted the wives were much use. The Prince resolved to prove her wrong. [76]

The awkward Kaiser so admired this vision that he rewarded the beautiful nineteen-year-old Amazon commander, Elena Sardanova, wife of a captain, with a most unimperial kiss on the lips. Then he galloped back to meet the

Empress. She encountered Potemkin's Amazons on her next stop at the Greek village of Kadykovka as she processed down an avenue of laurels, oranges and lemons. Potemkin told her that the Amazons would like to demonstrate their shooting prowess. Catherine, probably secretly bored with military demonstrations, refused. Instead, she embraced Sardanova, gave her a diamond ring worth 1,800 roubles, and 10,000 roubles for her troop.¹

The Amazons joined Catherine's escort of Tartars, Cossacks and Albanians for the rest of the trip. As the imperial procession trundled along the fecund, mountainous south-eastern shore of the Crimea, its most paradaisical coun­tryside, where they passed Potemkin's vineyards, it must have been quite a sight. The aura of success about the 'Road to Byzantium' allowed the two Caesars to relax. Joseph even admitted that Potemkin kept him waiting in his anteroom like an ordinary courtier but said he could not help but forgive that extraordinary man - quite a departure for a petulant Habsburg.¹

Bouncing along in their carriage, Catherine and Joseph discussed the sort of things that heads of state have in common. Ligne sat in a royal sandwich between them, drifting off to sleep, only to wake up hearing one say, 'I have thirty million subjects, only counting the male population,' while the other admitted to only twenty million. One asked the other: 'Has anyone ever tried to assassinate you?' They discussed their alliance. 'What the deuce shall we do with Constantinople?', Joseph asked Catherine.³

At Kaffa, the old slave port refounded by Potemkin as Theodosia, Ser­enissimus played one of his tricks on Segur. As the party climbed into the carriages that morning, Segur bumped into an exquisite young girl in Cir­cassian dress. The colour drained from his face: she was the precise image of his wife. 'I thought for a moment Madame de Segur had come from France to meet me. Imagination moves fast in the land of marvels.' The girl dis­appeared. A beaming Potemkin took her place. 'Isn't the resemblance perfect then?', he asked Segur, adding that he had seen the wife's portrait in his tent.

'Complete and unbelievable,' replied the stunned husband.

'Well, batushka,' said Potemkin, 'this young Circassian girl belongs to a man who will let me dispose of her and, as soon as you reach St Petersburg, I will give her to you.'

Segur tried to refuse because his wife might not appreciate this expression of affection. Potemkin was hurt and accused Segur of false delicacy. So Segur promised to accept another present,[77] whatever it might be.⁴ The party climbed into the rolling, green hills of the interior to view Potemkin's gardens, dairies, flocks of sheep and goats, and his pink 'Tartar' Palace at Karasubazaar.f

This, according to an Englishwoman visiting a decade later, was 'one of those fairy palaces' that arose 'as if by magic by the secret arrangement of Potemkin, to surprise and charm'.⁵

They found an English island here. Capability Brown would have rec­ognized the English gardens - 'clumps of majestic trees, a most extensive lawn', leading to 'woods which make a delightful pleasure ground laid out by our countryman Gould', and there was Henderson's English dairy. Potemkin's idyll was incomplete without a full English tea too. Henderson's 'nieces', who had travelled out with Jeremy Bentham, caught Ligne's experi­enced eye: 'Two heavenly creatures dressed in white' came out, sat the travellers down at a table covered in flowers 'on which they placed butter and cream. It reminded me of breakfast in English novels.' There were barracks and soldiers to inspect for Joseph, but he was completely uncharmed. 'We had to go through mountain roads,' he grumbled to Field-Marshal Lacey, 'just to make us see a billy-goat, an Angora sheep and a sort of English garden.'⁶

Potemkin laid on a feu d'artifice that impressed even these firework-weary dignitaries. In the midst of a banquet, 20,000 big rockets exploded and 55,000 burning pots crowned the mountains twice with the initials of the Empress, while the English gardens were illuminated as if it was daylight. Joseph said he had never seen anything more awesome and could only marvel at the power of Potemkin, and therefore the Russian state, to do exactly what he wished, regardless of cost: 'We in Germany or France would never have dared undertake what is being done here ... Here human life and effort count for nothing ... The master orders, the slave obeys.'⁷

When they were back again in Bakhchisaray, Tartar women again occupied the minds of the worldly courtiers. Ligne, younger at fifty than when he was thirty, could no longer restrain his curiosity. 'What's the use of going through an immense garden when one is forbidden to examine the flowers? Before I leave the Crimea, I must at least see a Tartar woman without her veil.' So he asked Segur: 'Will you accompany me?' Ligne and Segur set off into the woods. They came upon three damsels washing, with their veils on the ground beside them. 'But alas,' recalled Segur, none was pretty. Quite the contrary. 'Mon Dieu!', exclaimed Ligne. 'Mahomet was quite right to order them to cover their faces.' The women ran away screaming. The peepers were pursued by Tartars shrieking curses and throwing stones.

Next day at dinner, Catherine was silent, Potemkin sulky - both probably exhausted. Ligne thought he would cheer them up with his naughty escapade. It displeased the Tsarina: 'Gentlemen, this joke was in poor taste.' She had conquered this land and commanded that Islam should be respected. The Tartars were now her subjects under imperial protection. If some of her pages had behaved so childishly, she would have punished them.⁸

Even the Kaiser was affected by the voluptuous atmosphere. Catherine let Joseph, Ligne and Segur (perhaps as a consolation after their reprimand) watch her audience with a Giray princess. But they were disappointed with this descendant of Genghis: 'her painted eyebrows and shining cosmetics made her look like a piece of china in spite of her lovely eyes', thought Segur. 'I would have preferred one of her servants,' Joseph told Lacey. The Kaiser was so taken with the beauty of Circassian women that this supposed pillar of the Enlightenment decided to buy one:[78] he gave one Lieutenant Tsiruli money to set off into the Kuban and purchase a 'pretty Circassian woman'. Potemkin approved it. That mission's outcome is unknown. However, Joseph did return to Vienna with what sounds like a different Circassian girl, aged six, whom he bought from a slave-trader.⁹ She was baptized as Elisabeth Gulesy, was educated at Court, and was left a pension in his will of 1,000 Gulden a year, not bad since Mozart's pension, granted in 1787, was only 800. Later she married a nobleman's majordomo and is lost to history.

On 2 June, Their Imperial Majesties finally parted on the steppes at Kizi- kerman. Joseph headed west towards Vienna, Catherine north towards Moscow. On 8 June, the Empress reached Poltava, the site of Peter the Great's victory over Charles XII of Sweden. Potemkin re-enacted the battle in what Segur called a huge 'animated tableau, living and moving, almost a reality' with 50,000 troops playing Russians and Swedes. Catherine's eyes shone with Petrine pride. Then Serenissimus presented her with the pearl necklace that he had shown Miranda. In return, Catherine issued a charter acclaiming Potemkin's achievements in the south, granted him 100,000 roubles and the new surname title of 'Tavrichevsky' - he was henceforth known as Kniaz Potemkin-Tavrichesky, Prince Potemkin of Taurida.f

'Papa,' she wrote on 9 June, 'I hope that you let me leave tomorrow without big ceremonies.' Next day, on the approaches to Kharkov, the weary pair parted. Catherine, accompanied by Branicka and 'your kitten' Skavronskaya, as well as the 'Pocket Ministers', met her grandsons, Alexander and Con­stantine, in Moscow. When she reached Tsarskoe Selo on 22 July, all the travellers on this magical voyage 'had to return to dry political calculations'.¹⁰

The driest of these calculations was the persistent allegation that Potemkin had deceived Catherine: the calumny of the 'Potemkin Village'. As soon as they arrived back, the 'Pocket Ministers' were interrogated by Potemkin's enemies to learn if Kherson, Sebastopol, the flocks and fleets, were real. But the 'Potemkin Village' was invented by a man who had never visited the

south, let alone seen Potemkin's achievements for himself.

Even in the 1770s, malicious rumours had alleged that Potemkin had done nothing in the south. That was manifestly untrue, so now his foes, and those of Russia, whispered that the whole show was a stupendous fraud. The embittered Saxon envoy Georg von Helbig, who was not on the journey, now coined his phrase 'Potemkinsche Dorfer', a concept so suited to political fraud, especially in Russia, that it entered the language to mean 'a sham, a facade, an unreal achievement'. Helbig did not stop at using his clever phrase in his diplomatic despatches but also published a biography, Potemkin der Taurier, in the magazine Minerva of Hamburg, during the 1790s, which was taken up by the enemies of Russia. Later a full version was published in German in 1809, which was expanded and published in French and English in the nineteenth century. It thus laid the foundation of a historical version of Potemkin that was as fabricated and unjust as it claimed his villages to be. It did not fit Serenissimus - but the mud stuck.¹¹

The cruise along the Dnieper provided the basis of the 'Potemkin Villages': Helbig claimed the settlements there were composed of facades - painted screens on pasteboards - that were moved along the river and seen by the Empress five or six times. Helbig wrote that thousands of peasants had been torn from their homes inside Russia and driven along the riverbank at night with their flocks to be ready for the arrival of the Empress next morning - 1,000 villages had been depopulated and many died of hunger during the resulting famine. The foreigners simply saw the same peasants every day.

The accusation of 'Potemkin Villages' had already been alleged years before the trip ever happened. When Kirill Razumovsky visited Kherson in 1782, the very existence of the town was a 'pleasant surprise', evidently because he had been told the project was just a mirage.¹² All foreign visitors to the south were warned in Petersburg that it was a big lie: Lady Craven reported, a year before Catherine set off, that 'those at Petersburg who were jealous of Potemkin's merit' told her there was no water in the Crimea - 'his having the Government of Taurida, and commanding the troops in it, may have caused the invention of 1000 ill-natured lies about this new country ... to lessen the share of praise, that is his due'.¹³ The Empress had been told for years - whether by the Heir's circle or by envious courtiers - that Potemkin was inventing his achievements. Garnovsky reported to the Prince, before Cath­erine departed, that she was being told that she would see only painted screens, not real buildings. In Kiev, the stories became more insistent. One of the reasons Catherine was so keen on the trip was surely to check on things for herself: when Potemkin tried to delay her departure from Kiev because arrangements were not complete, she told her secretary Khrapovitsky that she wanted to see for herself 'in spite of its non-readiness'.¹⁴

There is absolutely no evidence in Potemkin's own orders or in the accounts of eye-witnesses for the 'Potemkin Villages'. He certainly began his prep­arations for Catherine's visit as early as 1784, so it is not necessary for us to believe that the whole show was created overnight: that year, General Kahov- sky reported that palaces had been built or old houses redecorated for her imminent visit. Potemkin used travelling palaces - but most of Catherine's palaces were permanent: the ones at Kherson survived for more than a century afterwards. In Bakhchisaray, the Khan's Palace was to be 'repaired' and 'repainted'. The next year, in a list of improvements across the Crimea from building new salt stores in Perekop to Gould's chestnut-tree 'paradise' in Kaffa, Potemkin was ordering that, in Bakhchisaray, Kahovsky was to build up 'the large street where the Empress will pass' with 'good houses and shops'.¹⁵ This order to improve some existing buildings is the nearest the thousands of documents in Potemkin's archives yield as evidence of cosmetic presentation. Miranda is a key, unprejudiced witness because he accompanied Potemkin on his pre-trip inspection, but saw nothing being falsified. On the contrary, this witness testifies to the massive reality of Potemkin's work.

What about the dancing peasants and their herds on the riverbanks? It was simply impossible to move such numbers around in those days, especially at night. Cattle and sheep perish if so driven. Potemkin's inability to conceal the fiasco of the lost kitchen of Kaidak, where he himself had to cook dinner for the two monarchs, is more evidence that he was unlikely to have been able to move thousands of men and animals across vast distances to deceive his guests.¹⁶ Nor were these flocks completely new: the nomads there had always kept cattle and sheep. Potemkin added to them and improved their quality: Miranda saw the flocks of sheep on the steppe,¹⁷ while, a year earlier, Lady Craven proves that Potemkin did not need to use magic on the riverbanks and steppes: she watched huge, grazing herds of 'horses, cows and sheep approaching, making at once a simple and majestic landscape full of peace and plenty'.¹⁸ The flocks were there already. They were real.

The crowds did not need to be forced to see the Empress. No tsar had visited the south since Peter the Great sixty years earlier, so who would not hurry to gawp at not one, but two Caesars? Even in Smolensk, crowds turned out to see the Empress from twenty leagues away.¹⁹ Besides, the local peasants surely wished to sell produce to the imperial kitchens. When Lady Craven visited Bakhchisaray a year earlier, a solitary, unknown foreigner, the streets were lined by curious and enthusiastic Tartars and soldiers, so their reaction to the arrival of two monarchs was only slightly greater.²⁰ This is not to say there was no element of show on the banks of the Dnieper: on the contrary, Potemkin beautified and ornamented everything that he could. He was a political impresario who understood the power of presentation and enjoyed the aspect of 'play' in politics, which was entirely self-conscious and delib­erate.²¹

Today, a visit by a head of state is routinely prepared and minutely choreo­graphed in detail, houses repainted, streets cleaned, tramps and whores arrested, banners festooned across streets. Brass-bands play, indigenous schoolchildren dance, and the stops at well-stocked shops are prearranged.²²

In many ways, this was the first such visit. Everyone knew that the Amazons, Cossacks and instant English gardens were shows, just as Queen Elisabeth II knows that the Zulu impis with assegai and shields who perform on her trips are not typical inhabitants of Johannesburg.[79] This was what Segur meant when he said that Potemkin had 'an amazing knack of overcoming all obstacles, conquering Nature ... cheating the eye of the dreary uniformity of the long stretches of sandy plain'.²³

It is certainly true that, wherever the Empress went, the local officials tidied up the streets, added a lick of paint to buildings and concealed ugliness. In two towns, Kharkov and Tula, not part of Potemkin's show-route, the gov­ernors did conceal things from her and may have built false houses.f Thus it is ironic that the sole accounts of 'Potemkin villages' suggest they were not perpetrated by Potemkin at all.²⁴ One could argue that Potemkin was the inventor of modern political spectacle - but not that he was a fairground huckster.

Serenissimus did not need to falsify towns and fleets, as the foreigners, from Miranda to Joseph, testify.²⁵ The Empress could not visit every site and even Potemkin was deceived by his officials, but Kaiser Joseph made a point of inspecting everything and admitted that all was real - though he revealingly added that, if he had not seen things with his own eyes, he would not have believed it.²⁶ Ligne also went out on his own and discovered 'superb establishments in their infancy, growing manufactures, villages with regular streets surrounded with trees and irrigated...'.

Catherine, among other allegations, had been specifically told that Pot­emkin had ruined the army by reforming the cavalry. When she saw his magnificent light cavalry at Kremenchuk, she felt anger at those who had lied to her, exclaiming to Ligne, 'Wicked people - how they deceived me!'²⁷ This was the reason for Catherine's double joy at finding that the rumours were lies and her keenness to tell her grandsons and officials like Count Bruce what she had seen: 'It is nice to see these places with my own eyes. They warned me against the Crimea, scaring me and dissuading me from seeing it for myself. Having arrived here, I wonder the reason for such rash prejudice.' She even admitted 'her great surprise' that Kherson was so developed. But her assertions did not stop the calumnies against Potemkin.²⁸

'Already the ridiculous story has been circulated that pasteboard villages were painted on our roads ... that the ships and guns were painted, the cavalry horseless,' Ligne wrote to Paris. He touched at once on the reasons for it: 'Even those among the Russians, ... vexed at not being with us, will pretend we have been deceived.' Ligne knew 'very well what legerdemain tricks are', but the achievements were real.²⁹ Potemkin was well aware of the lies spread about him by his enemies. 'And the main thing', he wrote to Catherine afterwards, 'is that malice and jealousy could never harm me in your eyes.' The Empress said he was right: 'You've smacked your enemies' fingers.'³⁰

Their fingers might have been smarting, but that did not stop them for long. Back in Petersburg, Potemkin's enemies were determined to discredit him, despite all the evidence. Overexcited courtiers like Evgraf Chertkov (the witness at Potemkin's wedding to Catherine) did not help by telling everyone, 'I saw miracles, which appeared there only God knows how ... It was like a dream ... Only he [Potemkin] is able to do such things.'³¹ This was exactly what enemies like Grand Duke Paul wanted to hear.

The Tsarevich summoned Ligne and Segur to question Potemkin's achieve­ments. He was not going to let the truth interfere with his prejudices. 'In spite of all these two travellers have been able to tell him, he does not wish to be persuaded that things are in as good a state as one tells him.'³² When Ligne conceded that Catherine could not see everything, Paul exploded: 'Oh! I know it very well. It's why this bitch of a nation does not want to be governed only by women!'³³ This determination, even at Court, explains the persistence of the lies even when eye-witnesses disproved them. The lies were amplified by critics of Russian expansion. It is easy to imagine how, once Potemkin and Catherine were dead, this calculated disinformation became transformed into the gospel of history. Even the 1813 English adaptation of Helbig's work concluded that the 'envy which fastens itself upon great men has magnified what was but show, and diminished what was real'.³⁴ Potemkin was a victim of his own overwhelming triumph. The 'Potemkin Village' is itself one of history's biggest shams.

The new Prince of Taurida sank into one of his bouts of depressed exhaustion, a symptom of the anti-climax after such manic overwork and dazzling success. He remained a few days in Kremenchuk and, in mid-July, set up Court at Kherson, where he fell ill, languishing on his divan, brooding and playing with diamonds. This was not an ideal time for the Prince to be depressed. Since October 1786, he had been in charge of all Ottoman policy and 'arbiter of peace and war'. Now the Ottoman Empire was moving towards war. Ever since the loss of the Crimea and Georgia, and the admission of Russian influence in the Danubian Principalities, the Ottomans had sought the chance to claw back these shameful concessions.³⁵

There was tumult in Istanbul as early as March and into May. 'Here, the public talk only of war,' reported Potemkin's best agent, N. Pisani, a scion of one of Istanbul's professional diplomatic families who interpreted and spied for everyone. Sultan Abdul-Hamid, pressured by his pro-war Grand Vizier, Yusuf-Pasha, and the muftis, was deliberately testing Russian resolve: in 1786, the Hospodar of Moldavia Mavrocordato was driven out; Russia gave him refuge. The Georgian Tsar Hercules was being attacked by the local Pasha. The Turks backed Sheikh Mansour and his Chechens, so Potemkin strengthened his Mozdok Line. The Porte refortified its bases from the Kuban to the Danube, from Anapa and Batumi to Bender and Ismail, and rebuilt its fleets, hence the show of strength off Ochakov on Catherine's visit. The warriors', added Pisani, 'become daily more insolent and commit all sorts of excesses.'³⁶

Potemkin, feeling strong with his new fleet and Catherine's imminent visit, had certainly played a part in this escalating brinkmanship. In December 1786, he had ordered Bulgakov, envoy to the Porte, to demand that these pinpricks in the Danubian Principalities and the Caucasus cease forthwith.³⁷ He offered either war or the guarantee of Russian Black Sea possessions in return for security for the Ottoman Empire. At that moment, the Sublime Porte leaned towards security. His language was strong, but not excessively provocative. If it had been so, the Ottomans would have attacked during Catherine's visit. Cobenzl thought Potemkin's demands 'very minor'.³⁸ In March, Potemkin ordered Bulgakov: 'We do everything to avoid war but it will certainly follow if they ignore our requests ... Try to explain to the Sultan how minor and just they are.'³⁹ When Bulgakov consulted with Potemkin at Kherson that June, the aim was to avoid war, not cause it. In August, Potemkin specifically told Bulgakov to 'win another two years'.⁴⁰ Delay was necessary, preparations unfinished.⁴¹

Serenissimus' martial boasting may have looked like a longing for war, but he had gained the Sech, Crimea and Georgia with the threat of war, without losing the bones of a single Ekaterinoslav Grenadier. He knew that ultimately he would have to fight the Turks because their resentment increased with each Russian success. But it is clear that he talked war in order not to have to fight it. However, Potemkin has been blamed for causing the war through his blunderingly aggressive diplomacy. This view is partly based on the hindsight that Russia was bullying the weak Turks, while in fact the Porte was raising armies and fleets that were much improved since their dismal performance in the First Turkish War. It is also based on ignorance of the war fever in Istanbul and the Ottoman policy of provoking Russia in the Caucasus and on the Danube. If the Prince is guilty of anything, it was creating the Black Sea Fleet and arranging the imperial visit to the Crimea: these declared that the Russian presence on the Black Sea was permanent, but also suggested that this was the Porte's last chance to dislodge it. So the arms race and provocations were mutual and simultaneous. The war was caused by a mutual tightening of the screw so that ultimately it came before either side was fully ready for it.

The Russian envoy returned to find Constantinople infected with war fever. Grand Vizier Yusuf-Pasha, supported by the Janissaries and the imams, was deliberately, according to Pisani on i June 1787, 'animating the canaille ... to intimidate their Sovereign to make him believe the people want war and that otherwise they will rebel against him'. The mob was rioting. Recruits from Asia poured through the city on their way to Ismail, the main fortress of Moldavia. Ottoman armies numbered 300,000. Only the peaceful resolve of the Sultan and his prestigious Capitan-Pasha (Grand Admiral) Hassan- Pasha restrained them.⁴² Prussia, Sweden, Britain and France encouraged the Turks - indeed Pisani reported, 'I have in my hands the notebook of the plan' by French officers to retake the Crimea. Finally, the Sultan buckled. The Porte made impossible demands to Bulgakov, such as the return of Georgia and the acceptance of Turkish consuls in Russian cities. Bulgakov rejected them, was arrested on 5 August and thrown into the Seven Towers. On the 20th, Ottoman ships attacked two Russian frigates off Ochakov. After a six-hour battle, the Russians escaped. It was war.⁴³

'I am afraid you have no more nails on your fingers,' Catherine declared to Potemkin on 24 August, writing to discuss their strategy, and membership of her Council. 'You've chewed them all off.'⁴⁴ How well she knew him. The relationship between Catherine and Potemkin entered a new phase that month: their letters became much longer as the theatre of operations and diplomacy broadened. More than ever, they became partners in both glory and anguish, public and private. They corresponded like an old couple who happen to rule an empire, loving yet often irritated, exchanging political ideas and gossip, giving each other confidence, praise, new clothes and sick remedies. But the Prince, sitting in Kremenchuk, shivered from spasms of fever, and sank deeper in dysphoric darkness. Contrary to the usual histories, he did not neglect his duties but became exhausted because he had con­centrated so much power in his own hands. This worried Catherine: 'You do everything yourself so you have no rest.'⁴⁵

Apart from Peter the Great himself, Potemkin was Russia's first commander- in-chief of both military and naval forces across several different theatres of war. As war minister, he was responsible for all fronts, from the Swedish and Chinese borders to those of Poland and Persia. There were two main armies facing the Turks. The Prince commanded the main Ekaterinoslav Army in the centre while Field-Marshal Rumiantsev-Zadunaisky commanded the smaller Ukraine Army that covered him in the west on the Moldavian border. In addition, Potemkin was his own grand admiral of the Black Sea Fleet. In the Caucasus and the Kuban, he commanded the corps fighting both the Otto­mans and the Chechen and Circassian tribes led by Sheikh Mansour. None of these forces were complete or fully prepared - though fortunately this was equally true of the Turks. Potemkin amassed his forces and waited for the two out of every 500 levy from the interior to raise 60,000 new recruits. Furthermore he was in charge of co-ordinating operations with his Austrian allies and increasingly, of Russian policy in Poland. It was a gigantic command that required, not only the ability to supply these forces and co-ordinate land and sea operations, but also sweeping strategic vision.

The prime Ottoman aim was to recover the Crimea, using the powerful fortress of Ochakov as their base. They first had to take Potemkin's city of Kherson. The key to Kherson was Kinburn, the small Russian fortress on the end of a spit at the mouth of the Liman, the long estuary of the Dnieper river. Potemkin energetically ordered defensive measures. Forces were sent to Kinburn under Potemkin's best general, Alexander Suvorov. On 14 September, the Turks tried to land at Kinburn but were repelled. The Prince ordered the Black Sea Fleet to put to sea from Sebastopol to hunt the Ottoman fleet, said to be at Varna.⁴⁶ Yet Potemkin's fever and depression undermined his strength. 'The illness makes me weaker every day,' he confided in Catherine. If he did not recover, let her give the command to Rumiantsev.⁴⁷

'God forbid to hear you are so sick and weak as to pass the command to Rumiantsev,' Catherine replied on 6 September. 'You're on my mind day and night ... It's God I ask and pray to save you alive and unharmed - how necessary you are both for me and the Empire, you know that.' She agreed that they had to act defensively until the spring, but they worried whether the Turks would attack before the Russian forces were ready and whether Joseph would honour his side of their treaty.⁴⁸

Her words encouraged him. 'You write to me like a real mother,' he replied and gave her a strategic overview in his usual colourful turn of phrase: Suvorov in Kinburn was 'a man who serves with his sweat and blood' while Kahovsky in the Crimea would 'climb astride a cannon with the same sang­froid with which he would lie on a sofa'. He advised Catherine to appease Britain and Prussia, already foreseeing their policies. Then he suggested that Russia should send its Baltic Fleet to the Mediterranean as it had during the last war. But, even as he wrote, he seemed to collapse again: he could neither sleep nor eat and was 'very weak, millions of troubles, hypochondria too strong. Not even a minute's rest, I'm not even sure I can stand it long.'⁴⁹ His letters ceased.

Then suddenly Potemkin's world collapsed. He learned that the Black Sea Fleet, his beloved creation and the very arsenal of Russian power, had been destroyed in a storm on 9 September. He became almost mad. 'I'm exhausted, Matushka,' he wrote on the 19th. 'I'm good for nothing ... God forbid, if any losses happen, if I haven't died of sorrow, I'll throw my merits at your feet and hide in obscurity ... let me rest, a little. Really I can't stand any more ...'. Yet he was also clear-minded and efficient - the armies were forming, manoeuvring and provisioning - and Kinburn was ready: he had done all he could but that did not help his physical and mental state.⁵⁰

'Lady Matushka, I've become unlucky,' Potemkin, who so believed in Providence, wrote to his empress on 24 September. 'Despite all the measures I'm taking, everything's gone topsy-turvy. The Sebastopol Fleet has been crushed ... God defeats me, not the Turks.' His sensitive emotions dived towards the very bottom of his cyclothymic nature at the critical moment for which his entire career had been a preparation. He fell into deep despair, though historically his collapse puts him in good company: Peter the Great suffered almost suicidal emotional crises after Narva in 1700, so did Frederick the Great at both Mollwitz in 1740, whence he fled, and Hochkirch in 1758. In our century,⁵¹ the best examples of such temporary breakdowns at similarly vital moments were those suffered by Joseph Stalin, faced with the German invasion on 22 June 1941, and Yitzhak Rabin, Israeli Chief of Staff, in May 1967, planning the pre-emptive strike of the Six Day War.[80]

The Prince was in such a manic state that he confided in Rumiantsev- Zadunaisky, his old teacher,' 'My career is finished. I've almost gone mad.' He scrawled a second note to Catherine that day, suggesting that Russian abandon the Crimea, his prize, his own title - since, without a fleet in Sebastopol, what was the point of keeping so many troops cooped up there? 'Assign the command to someone else ...', he beseeched her. On God's word he had always been devoted to her. But now: 'Really I'm almost dead.. Л⁵²

2.6

JEWISH COSSACKS AND AMERICAN ADMIRALS: POTEMKIN'S WAR

Prince Potemkin formed the singular project of raising a regiment of Jews ... he intends to make Cossacks of them. Nothing amused me more.

The Prince de Ligne

You would be charmed with the Prince Potemkin than whom no one could be more noble-minded.

John Paul Jones to the Marquis de Lafayette

Catherine rallied the Prince of Taurida. Tn these moments, my dear friend, you are not just a private person who lives, and does what he likes,' she told him on the very day he wrote so desperately. 'You belong to the state, you belong to me.' Nonetheless she sent Potemkin an order, authorizing him to transfer command to Rumiantsev-Zadunaisky if he wished.

When she received his most frantic letters, she displayed her cool good sense. 'Nothing is lost,' she said, like a strict but indulgent German school­mistress. 'The storm that was so harmful for us was equally harmful for the enemy.' As for withdrawal from the Crimea, there seemed 'no need to rush to start the war by evacuating a province which is not in danger'.[81] She ascribed his depression to what she called the 'excessive sensibility and ardent assiduity' of 'my best friend, foster-child and pupil, who is sometimes even more sane than myself. But this time, I am more vigorous than you because you're ill and I'm well.'¹ This was the essence of their partnership: whoever was up would look after whoever was down. War had given the partners more worry but also more to share. Their military discussion often alternated with the warmest declarations of love and friendship.

A week later, Potemkin emerged from his depression, partly thanks to Catherine's letters, but even more because it turned out the fleet was damaged but not ruined: only one ship had been lost. The destruction of the Sebastopol Fleet was such a blow I don't even know how I survived it,' he confessed to his empress. He was relieved he could hand over to Rumiantsev if it became too much. They agreed that she should despatch Prince Nikolai Repnin, a talented general and Panin's nephew, to command the army under him. Serenissimus apologized for giving her such a shock: 'It's not my fault I am so sensitive.'² She sympathized. In a very eighteenth-century diagnosis, Catherine blamed much of it on his bowels: his spasms 'are nothing but wind', she decreed. 'Order them to give you something to get rid of the wind ... I know how painful they are for people as sensitive and impatient as us.'³

Potemkin had just recovered when the war began in earnest. On the night of 1 October, after a bombardment and several false starts, the Turks landed 5,000 crack Janissaries on Kinburn's thin spit and tried to storm the fortress. The Turks constructed entrenchments. The Russians, under the brilliant Suvorov, charged thrice and finally managed to slaughter virtually the entire Ottoman force, but at a high cost. Suvorov himself was wounded twice. But the victory at Kinburn meant that Kherson and the Crimea were safe until the spring.

'I can't find words to express how I appreciate and respect your important service, Alexander Vasilievich,'⁴ Potemkin wrote to Suvorov, who was nine years older. The two great eccentrics and outstanding talents of their time had known each other since the First Turkish War. Their tense relationship fizzed with mutual admiration and irritation. Suvorov was a wiry little general with a cadaverous comedian's face, brutal, intelligent eyes and repertoire of zany antics. 'Hero, buffoon, half-demon and half-dirt,' wrote Byron, 'Har­lequin in uniform.'⁵ He rolled naked on the grass every morning, doing somersaults in front of his army, jumped on tables, sang in the midst of high society, mourned a decapitated turkey by trying to return its head to its neck, lived in a straw hut on the beach, stood on one leg at parade and set his armies marching by crowing thrice like a cockerel. He asked his men mad questions such as 'How many fish are there in the Danube?' The correct answer was a firm one. 'God save us from the "Don't knows",' he used to exclaim.⁶

Soon after Kinburn, a young French volunteer was writing a letter when his tent was unceremoniously opened and a scarecrow entered, wearing just a shirt. This 'fantastical apparition' asked to whom he was writing. To his sister in Paris, he replied. 'But I want to write a letter too,' said Suvorov, grabbing a pen and writing her a complete letter. When the sister received it, she said it was mostly unreadable - and the rest utterly crazy. The Frenchman decided 'I had to deal with a lunatic.' Legend has it that Suvorov once heard Catherine saying, vis-a-vis Potemkin, that all great men were eccentrics. Suvorov immediately began daily affecting a new singularity which in the end became second nature. Yet he spoke six foreign languages and was a connoisseur of ancient history and literature.⁷

Suvorov, who like Potemkin advocated informal, easy clothes and simple tactics of attack, was unlike the Prince in his ruthless, very Russian lack of concern for the lives of his men. The bayonet was his favourite weapon: 'Cold steel - bayonets and sabres! Push the enemy over, hammer them down, don't lose a moment.' Never trust the musket, 'that crazy bitch'. He always wanted to storm and charge regardless of losses: speed and impact were everything. His greatest battles, Ismail and Praga, were bloodbaths.⁸ Every commander- in-chief needs a Suvorov. Potemkin was lucky to have him but he used him skilfully.[82]

Serenissimus now hailed Suvorov as 'my dear friend' and sent him endless presents from a greatcoat to a hamper of 'pate de Perigord' - foie gras.⁹ He urged Catherine to promote Suvorov above his seniority: 'Who Matushka could have such leonine courage?' He should be given Russia's highest order, the St Andrew. 'Who has deserved the distinction more than him? ... I begin with myself - give him mine!'¹⁰ Potemkin's alleged jealousy of his subordinate became part of the Suvorov legend, but there is no trace of it in any of Potemkin's letters and it would have seemed absurd during their lifetimes: Potemkin was supreme and Suvorov was just one of his generals. Suvorov was so moved by Potemkin's affectionate letters that he wrote back, 'I am a commoner! How can it be I was not flattered by Your Highness's favour! The key to the secrets of my soul lie in your hands for ever.'¹¹ Suvorov was Potemkin's match in eccentricity and talent: contrary to the mythology of their hatred, they admired each other. Indeed their passionate, half-mad letters almost read like a love affair. 'You can't oversuvorov Suvorov,' joked Serenissimus.

Potemkin inspected Kherson, Kinburn and the fleets on one of his flying tours and then established his headquarters at Elisabethgrad, where he held his winter Court and planned the coming campaign. But he kept up his inspections: after a thousand versts on the road in icy weather, he complained to Catherine of piles and headaches. But he was achieving miracles in terms of repairing the old fleet and building a new flotilla to fight on the Liman.

Grand Duke Paul declared he wished to fight the Turks and bring his wife to the front. Paul's companionship was a dire prospect for Serenissimus, with the risk that the Heir might try to undermine his command. Nonetheless he agreed in principle. Catherine loathed her son now, comparing him to 'mustard after dinner'. Despite two requests, she managed to put him off, using anything - from crop failure to the Grand Duchess's latest pregnancy - to spare Serenissimus this tedious and dangerous fate. Paul spent the rest of the war drilling his troops at Gatchina 'like a Prussian major, exaggerating the importance of every trivial and minute detail', while tormenting himself with his father's murder and threatening everyone with 'hardness and ven­geance' on his accession. He had to bite his lip and congratulate Serenissimus on his victories, but his wife was grateful for Potemkin's kindness to her brothers, who served in his army. As Catherine grew older, Potemkin flattered Paul, who remained sour as ever - 'Heaven and Earth were guilty in his eyes.' He took every opportunity to denounce his mother's partner to anyone who would listen.¹²

Joseph had not yet accepted the casus foederis of the treaty, but still complained that Potemkin and Rumiantsev were doing nothing. The Russians and the Austrians were watching each other closely: each wanted the other to bear the brunt of the war without losing out on the rewards. Both sides sent spies to watch each other.¹³

Joseph's spy was the Prince de Ligne, who was ordered to use his friendship with Potemkin to get the Russians to do as much of the fighting as possible. 'You will report to me on a separate piece of paper in French,' Joseph secretly instructed Ligne, 'which will be concealed and placed in an ordinary packet with the envelope addressed carefully: For His Majesty Alone.'¹⁴ The 'jockey diplomatique'¹⁵ did not know that this fell into the hands of the Russian Cabinet Noir - it remains in Potemkin's archives - but he did notice Ser­enissimus' reserve when he turned up in Elisabethgrad. 'The Prince de Ligne, whom I love, is now a burden,' Potemkin told Catherine.¹⁶ War was the ruin of their friendship.

Elisabethgrad was a godforsaken little garrison-town, forty-seven miles from the Ottoman frontier. 'What weather, what roads, what winter, what Headquarters I found in Elisabeth,' wrote Ligne, who embraced Potemkin and asked, 'When to Ochakov?' This was a ludicrous question given that it was mid-winter and the Austrians, who were as surprised and unprepared as the Russians, had so far not even declared war. 'My God,' replied the still- depressed Potemkin. 'There are 18,000 men in the garrison. I don't even have as many in my army. I lack everything. I'm the unluckiest man if God doesn't help me.' Potemkin listed the Turkish garrisons in the nearby Ottoman fortresses, Akkerman, Bender and Khotin. 'Not a word of truth in all of that,'¹⁷ Ligne commented. He was wrong.¹⁸ Pisani's reports from Istanbul testified that the fortress had been freshly manned and refortified. [83] Potemkin had no intention of wasting Russian lives to save Austrian reputations: one has the distinct impression that some of his depression was diplomatic madness to distract the Austrians.

Potemkin lived splendidly in the misery of Elisabethgrad in a wooden palace beside the old fortress. Foreign volunteers - Spaniards, Piedmontese, Portuguese and especially French aristocrats - poured into the frozen town along with a 'vile troop of subaltern adventurers'. On 12 January 1788, Roger, Comte de Damas, having run away from France to find gloire, arrived to offer his services. Aged just twenty-three, with a shock of black curls, graceful and fearless, Talleyrand's cousin was the lover of the Marquise de Coigny, a sometime mistress of Ligne whom Marie-Antoinette called 'queen of Paris'. On arrival, he asked for his mistress's friend Ligne. Up in the castle, he was told. Thence he was directed to Potemkin's palace. He passed two guards and entered an immense hall, full of orderlies. This led to a long suite that was as brightly lit as a 'fete in some capital city'.

The first room he saw was full of adjutants awaiting Potemkin; in the second, Sarti conducted his orchestra of horns; in the third, thirty to forty generals surrounded a huge billiard table.¹⁹ On the left, Serenissimus gambled with a niece and a general. This Court was 'not inferior to a lot of Sovereigns of Europe'. Russian generals were so servile that, if Potemkin dropped some­thing, twenty of them scrummaged to pick it up.²⁰ The Prince rose to meet Damas, sat him at his side and invited him to dinner with Ligne and his niece at a small table, while the generals ate at a bigger one. From then on, Damas dined with Potemkin every day for three months of luxury and impatience.²¹ Ligne was the consolation of the foreigners - 'a child in society, Lovelace with the women'. There was no shortage.

Potemkin could never bear war without women. He was soon joined for the winter by a coterie of goddesses, all in their late teens or early twenties, who came to meet their husbands in the army. There was the Russian Aphrodite - Princess Ekaterina Dolgorukaya, wife of an officer and daughter of Prince Fyodor Bariatinsky, one of Catherine's senior courtiers. She was acclaimed for her 'beauty, grace, fine tastes, delicate tact, humour and talent'. Then there was the lissom and wanton Ekaterina Samoilova, wife of Pot­emkin's nephew and daughter of Prince Sergei Trubetskoi. She was the 'most adorable woman', with whom Ligne was soon in love and writing poems that catch the grimness of life there: 'Dromedaries, horses; Zaporogians, sheep; They're all we meet here.'²² The third of this graceful troika was Pavel Potemkin's wife, Praskovia.²³ Segur teased Potemkin from Petersburg on his affair with a girl with 'beautiful black eyes with whom it is claimed you try the Twelve Labours of Hercules'.²⁴ Damas said Potemkin 'subordinated the art of war, the science of politics and the government of the kingdom to his particular passions'.²⁵ This galaxy of Venuses revolved around Potemkin: who was to be the next sultana-in-chief?

Potemkin and Ligne tormented each other: Potemkin was pressuring the Austrians to enter the war 'against our common enemy'.²⁶ Ligne waved one of Joseph's letters, which contained a war plan, and demanded Potemkin's strategy. Potemkin delayed, and after two weeks Ligne claimed he was fobbed off with the statement: 'With the help of God I'll attack everything that is between the Bug and the Dniester.' This was another Ligne lie. In an unpub­lished letter, Potemkin had quite clearly laid out the Russian plan: 'We'll undertake the siege of Ochakov, while the army of the Ukraine covers Bender, and the Caucasus and Kuban corps would fight the mountain tribes and Ottomans to the east.²⁷

Ligne however did not exaggerate Serenissimus' impossible moodiness towards him: they were 'sometimes fine, sometimes bad, arguing at daggers drawn or uncontested favourite, sometimes gambling with him, talking or not talking, staying up until six in the morning'. Ligne said he was the nurse for a 'spoilt child' and a malicious one at that. But Potemkin was equally fed up with Ligne's 'villainous ingratitude', because his Cabinet Noir had opened all Ligne's lying letters to his friends. Serenissimus grumbled to Catherine that the 'jockey diplomatique' could not make up his mind: 'in his eyes, I am sometimes Thersites and sometimes Achilles', the louche Thersites of Troilus and Cressida or the heroic Achilles of the Iliad. It was a love-hate rela­tionship.²⁸

Between conducting adulteries, laughing at dromedaries and playing bil­liards, Potemkin was achieving a miracle ready for the next year. First he was awaiting his reserves and his levy of recruits, so that gradually an army of about 40,000-50,000 assembled in Elisabethgrad. Across the Mediterranean, Potemkin's officers tried to recruit more men, particularly from Greece and Italy: for example, on the island of Corsica it is said that a young man offered himself for service to a Russian recruiter, General I.A. Zaborovsky. The Corsican demanded Russian rank equivalent to his position in the Garde Nationale Corse. He even wrote to his General Tamara about it.[84] But his request was refused and he remained in France. The name of this abortive recruit to Potemkin's army was Napoleon Bonaparte.²⁹

Serenissimus was creating the Cossack Host he had been planning ever since destroying the Zaporogian Sech. An honorary Zaporogian himself, Potemkin had a 'passion for the Cossacks'. His entourage was filled with them, often old friends from the First Turkish War like Sidor Bely, Chepega and Golavaty. Potemkin believed that the old Cuirassier heavy cavalry was outdated and inconvenient in southern wars. The Cossacks had copied the horsemanship of the Tartars and now Potemkin had his light cavalry emulate the Cossacks. But he also decided to reharness the Zaporogian Cossacks, tempting back their brethren who had defected to the Turks. 'Try to enlist the Cossacks,' he ordered Bely. 'I'll check them all myself.' He also filled up 394 ^the apogee

their ranks by recruiting new Cossacks from among Poles, Old Believers and even coachmen and petit bourgeois. Overcoming Catherine's caution, he founded the new 'Black Sea and Ekaterinoslav Host' under Bely and his Cossack proteges. They were later renamed the Kuban Cossacks, Russia's second largest Host (the Don remained bigger) until the Revolution. It was Potemkin who made the Cossacks the pillars of the Tsarist regime.³⁰

Potemkin decided to arm the Jews against the Turks. This 'singular project', probably his Jewish friend Zeitlin's idea, spawned in some rabbinical debate with the Prince, started as a cavalry squadron raised among the Jews of his Krichev estate. In December, he created a Jewish regiment called the Israel- ovsky, a word reminiscent of the Izmailovsky Guards. But that was where the similarities ended. Commanded by Prince Ferdinand of Brunswick, their ultimate aim was to liberate Jerusalem for the Jews, just as Potemkin was to conquer Constantinople for the Orthodox. This sign of Potemkin's unique philo-semitism and of Zeitlin's influence was an awkward idea given Russian and especially Cossack anti-semitism, but it was surely the first attempt by a foreign power to arm the Jews since Titus destroyed the Temple.

The Prince wanted his Israelovsky to be half-infantry, half-cavalry, the latter to be Jewish Cossacks with Zaporogian lances: 'we already have one squadron', observed Ligne to Joseph II. 'Thanks to the shortness of their stirrups, their beards come down to their knees and their fear on horseback makes them like monkeys.' Joseph, who had loosened the restrictions of his own Jews, was probably amused.

By March 1788, thirty-five of these bearded Jewish Cossacks were being trained. Soon there were two squadrons, and Ligne told Potemkin there were plenty more in Poland. Ligne was sceptical, but he admitted he had seen excellent Jewish postmasters and even postillions. The Israelovsky evidently went out on patrol with the cavalry because Ligne wrote that they were as terrified of their own horses as those of the enemy. But five months later Potemkin cancelled the Israelovsky. Ligne joked that he did not dare continue them for fear of 'getting mixed up with the Bible'. So ended this rare experi­ment that says a great deal about Potemkin's originality and imagination.[85] Ligne thought the Jewish Cossacks were 'too ridiculous'. Instead, Potemkin concentrated on a 'great number of Zaporogians and other Cossack vol­unteers' pouring in to form the new Black Sea Host.³¹

The 'Prince-Marshal', as the foreigners called him, was now repairing the damaged fleet while preparing a huge new flotilla to fight in the Liman beneath Ochakov. The Russians were exposed in the Liman. The nature of this shallow estuary meant that Potemkin would have to fight a different sort of war with a different sort of fleet. Potemkin and his admiral Mordvinov turned to the most ingenious shipbuilder they knew: Samuel Bentham's ver­micular barges had been left behind and forgotten when the Empress's tour headed for Kherson, leaving him to tag along behind.[86] Now he was needed again, but Serenissimus had forgotten to pay him. He was swiftly paid, but Potemkin was so embarrassed about the debts that he hardly spoke to Bentham. 'By order of His Highness', Sam was enrolled into the navy³² - though 'I had rather continue on terra firma.'³³ Potemkin ordered him to create a light flotilla that could fight the Turkish fleet in the Liman.³⁴ While Potemkin appeared to be lazing around at Elisabethgrad having tantrums with Ligne, the archives show that he was driving the creation of this fleet with all his force. 'Fit them up completely as quickly as possible with rigging and all their armaments,' he ordered Mordvinov. 'Don't lose any time over it.'³⁵

Joseph now accepted the casus foederis and launched a bungled pre­emptive strike against the Ottoman fortress of Belgrade in today's Serbia. The operation collapsed farcically when Austrian commandos, disguised in special uniforms, got lost in the fog. Potemkin was 'furious'³⁶ with Ligne about this military buffoonery, but it let the Russians off the hook. 'It's not very good for them,' Catherine told Potemkin, 'but it is good for us.' Joseph fielded his 245,000 men but went on the defensive across central Europe, which at least restrained the Turks, giving Potemkin time to fight the Battle of the Liman.³⁷

This strategy drove the Austrians to despair. Potemkin was adamant to Catherine that 'nobody can encourage me to undertake something when there's no profit in it and nobody can discourage me when there's a useful opportunity'.³⁸ Ligne tried to persuade him, but Potemkin laughed mali­ciously: 'Do you think you can come here and lead me by the nose?'³⁹ The Austrian general Prince Frederick Joseph de Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld failed to take Khotin too. A second lunge for Belgrade never even got started. The Austrian war was not going well.⁴⁰

So Potemkin treated Ligne to two unpublished strategic memoranda that the 'jockey diplomatique' does not mention in his famous letters because they firmly restore the balance of Austro-Russian achievements: 'It seems to me that on several occasions one has not been on guard enough,' and Serenissimus proceeded to explain how the Turks fought: 'They like to envelope their enemy on all sides ...'. Potemkin's advice was to concentrate forces, not spread them out in thin cordons, as Joseph was doing. Whether Joseph ever saw these documents, he did exactly what Potemkin warned him against, with disastrous results.⁴¹

Ligne could do nothing but accuse the Prince of the vainglorious pursuit of medals and lying about his victories. When a courier arrived with news of a victory in the Caucasus, Potemkin beamed: 'See if I do nothing! I've just killed 10,000 Circassians, Abyssinians, Imeretians and Georgians and I've already killed 5,000 Turks at Kinburn.' Ligne said this was a lie, but the Prince's generals Tekeli and Pavel Potemkin had won a series of victories across the Kuban in September and November against the Ottoman ally, Sheikh Mansour.⁴² Ligne simply had no conception of the breadth of Pot­emkin's command.[87]

It was now Catherine's turn to lose her confidence for a moment and Pot­emkin's to encourage her in his belief that the two of them were specially blessed. Christ would help her - as He had always done before. There were times', he reassured her, 'when all the escape-routes seem to be blocked. And then all of a sudden, chance intervened. Do rely on Him.' He thanked her for the fur coat she had sent. She missed him - especially in a crisis: 'without you, I feel as though I'm missing a hand and I get into trouble which I'd never get into with you. I keep fearing something is being missed.'⁴³ Later in the spring, she wrote a postscriptum to a short note, thanking him for his reassurances. 'I thought it would be nice to tell you that I love you, my friend, very much and without ceremony.' They were still so close that they usually thought the same way, and even suffered from the same ailments.⁴⁴

A Polish delegation now arrived in Elisabethgrad: Potemkin kept them waiting for days and then shocked them by receiving them in a dressing gown without breeches. Nonetheless, Potemkin paid serious attention to the problem of Poland. The sprawling Commonwealth was moving towards the so-called 'Four Year Sejm', the long parliament that presided over the Polish Revolution and overthrew the Russian protectorate. This was what Potemkin and King Stanislas-Augustus' proposed alliance might have avoided. 'Make Poland join us in the war,' the Prince urged Catherine.⁴⁵ He offered the Poles 50,000 rifles to equip Polish forces, which would include 12,000 Polish cavalry to fight the Turks. Potemkin wanted to command some of the Poles himself - 'at least a single brigade. I am as much of a Pole as they are,' he protested, referring to his Smolensk origins and indigenat as a Polish nobleman.

This offer to command Polish troops was not a casual one. He was still developing his flexible plans for dealing with Poland and his own future under Paul, partly based on his new Podolian estates.⁴⁶ In any case, Catherine distrusted the plan, perhaps nervous about his vast Polish lands and schemes. She would only propose a treaty that specifically preserved the weak, chaotic Polish Constitution that served Russian ends. It was never signed.

There was always comedy with Serenissimus, even in war. When his Cos­sacks captured four Tartars, the prisoners expected to be killed. But Potemkin cheerfully had them thrown into a barrel of water and then announced they had been baptized. When a half-senile Frenchman arrived, purporting to be a siege expert, the Prince questioned him, only to learn that the sage had forgotten most of his knowledge. 'I should like to peep ... and study the works that I have forgotten again,' said the old man. Potemkin, 'always kind and amiable' to characters, laughed and told him to relax: 'Don't kill yourself with all that reading.. Л⁴⁷

Samuel Bentham, working under Admiral Mordvinov and General Suvorov at Kherson, threw himself into creating a rowing flotilla, using all his ingenu­ity.[88] He adapted Catherine's 'cursed' imperial barges into gunboats, but his real work was to renovate a graveyard of old cannon and fit them on to any light boats that he could either convert or construct. 'I flatter myself I am the principal agent, filling out the Galleys and smaller vessels,' he wrote.⁴⁸

Bentham's masterpiece was to arm his ships with far heavier cannon than usual on most gunboats.⁴⁹ 'The employment of great guns of 36 or even 48 pounds on such small vessels as ships' long boats', Bentham boasted justifiably to his brother, 'was entirely my idea.'⁵⁰ It was to Potemkin's credit that, when he came to inspect in October, he immediately understood the significance of Bentham's idea and adopted it in the construction of all the frigates and gunboats, including twenty-five Zaporogian chaiki⁵¹ being built separately by his factotum Faleev. 'They respect the calibre of guns in the fleet, not the quantity,'⁵² Potemkin explained to Catherine. He managed to overcome his awkwardness and thank Bentham publicly for all he had done.⁵³ Bentham was delighted.

By the spring, Potemkin had created a heavy-armed light flotilla of about a hundred boats out of almost nothing.⁵⁴ Even Ligne had to agree that 'it needed a great merit of the Prince to have imagined, created and equipped' the fleet so fast.⁵⁵ The birth of the Liman fleet - another 'beloved child' - was perhaps the 'most essential service Potemkin rendered to Russia'.⁵⁶ Who was to command it? Nassau-Siegen arrived at Elisabethgrad in the New Year eager to serve. Potemkin enjoyed Nassau's pedigree - from the bed of the Queen of Tahiti to the raid on Jersey during the American War - but he knew his limitations. 'Almost a sailor',⁵⁷ he called Nassau - which made him perfect for his almost-fleet in the Liman. On 26 March, he placed Nassau, whose 'bravery' was 'renowned', in command of the rowing flotilla.⁵⁸

Potemkin inspected and reinspected maniacally: 'The extent of his author­ity, the fear he inspired and the prompt execution of his wishes made his visits of inspections seldom necessary.'⁵⁹ By late March, everything was almost ready. 'Then we can begin the dance,' declared Nassau.⁶⁰ But, just as every­thing seemed arranged with the command, an American admiral appeared on the Liman.

'Paul Jones has arrived,' Catherine told Grimm on 25 April 1788. 'I saw him today. I think he'll do marvellous things for us.'⁶¹ Catherine fantasized that Jones would slice straight through to Constantinople. John Paul Jones, born the son of a gardener on a Scottish island, was the most celebrated naval commander of his day. He is still regarded as one of the founders of the US Navy. His tiny squadron of ships had terrorized the British coast during the War of American Independence: his wildest exploit was to raid the Scottish coast, taking hostage the inhabitants of a country house. This earned him the enviable reputation in America as a hero of liberty, in France as a dashing heart-throb and in England as a despicable pirate. Prints were sold of him; English nannies scared their children with tales of this bloodsoaked ogre. When the War of Independence ended in 1783, Jones, living in Paris, found himself at a loose end. Grimm, Thomas Jefferson and the King of Poland's Virginian, Lewis Littlepage, had all helped direct him to Catherine, who knew that Russia needed sailors - and who could never resist a Western celebrity. Catherine is usually credited with hiring Jones without consulting Potemkin. But the archives show that Potemkin was simultaneously negotiating with him. 'In case this officer is now in France,' he told Simolin, the Russian envoy in Paris on 5 March, 'I ask Your Excellency to get him to come as early as possible so that we can use his talents in the opening of the campaign.'⁶²

Jones duly arrived at Tsarskoe Selo, but Admiral Samuel Greig and the British officers of the Baltic fleet refused to serve with the infamous corsair, so Catherine sent Jones straight down to Elisabethgrad. On 19 May 1788, Potemkin gave Rear-Admiral Pavel Ivanovich Dzones the command of his eleven battleships, while Nassau kept the rowing flotilla.⁶³ Jones was not the only American fighting for Potemkin: Lewis Littlepage, whom the Prince knew from Kiev, arrived as the King of Poland's spy at Russian HQ. At the Battle of the Liman, he commanded a division of gunboats. The Prince appointed Damas, Bentham and another English volunteer, Henry Fanshawe (Potemkin called him 'Fensch'), a gentleman from Lancashire, to command squadrons under Nassau. 'Lieutenant-Colonels Fensch and Bentham finally agreed to serve on board the ships,' Potemkin informed Mordvinov.

Nassau and the other three proved inspired choices for the flotilla,⁶⁴ the two Americans less so. Jones generated resentment and excitement: Fanshawe and Bentham were not impressed with the 'celebrated, or rather notorious', Jones and the former declared that 'nothing but the presence of the enemy could induce us to serve with him and no consideration whatever could bring us to serve under him'.⁶⁵ In Petersburg, Segur wrote a very modern if flattering letter about Fame to Potemkin: 'I did not expect having made war in America with Brave Paul Jones to meet him here so far from home but Celebrity Attracts Celebrity and I can't be surprised to see all those who love glory ... coming to associate their laurels with yours.' But Segur presciently begged Potemkin to be fair to Jones and never 'condemn him without having heard him'.⁶⁶

On 20 May 1788, Nassau saw the forest of masts of the Ottoman fleet in the Liman off Ochakov. 'We have to make a dance with the Capitan-Pasha,' Nassau boasted to his wife.⁶⁷ He swore to Damas that, in two months, he would either be dead or wearing the cross of St George.⁶⁸

Ghazi Hassan-Pasha, the Capitan-Pasha, commanded eighteen ships-of- the-line, forty frigates and scores of rowing galleys that brought his flotilla to over 109 ships, considerably more than the Russians in numbers and tonnage.⁶⁹ The Capitan-Pasha himself, renegade son of a Georgian Orthodox servant on the Barbary Coast, was the outstanding Ottoman warrior of the later eighteenth century, the latest in the tradition of the Algerian pirates who had come to the Sultan's rescue. The 'Algerine renegado', instantly recognizable by his 'fine white beard', had seen the inferno of Chesme and rushed back to protect Istanbul; defeated the Egyptian rebellions against the Sultan; and won the nickname 'the Crocodile of Sea Battles'.⁷⁰ He was the darling of the Istanbul mob. When Lady Craven visited his house in 1786, she recounted the magnificence of his lifestyle and bounty of diamonds in his wife's turban.⁷¹ He was always accompanied by a pet lion that lay down at his command.

Potemkin, again suffering an attack of nerves, wondered if he should evacuate the Crimea. 'When you are sitting on a horse,' Catherine replied, 'there is no point in getting off it and holding on by the tail.' Potemkin sought reassurance from his Empress rather than actual evacuation - and that was what she gave him.⁷²

The Liman or estuary of the Dnieper was a long, arrow and treacherous bay that stretched thirty miles towards the west before it opened into the Black Sea. It was only eight miles wide, but its mouth was just two miles across. The south shore was Russian, ending in Kinburn's narrow spit, but its mouth was dominated by the massive fortifications of the Ottoman fortress of Ochakov. It was of great strategic importance because Ochakov was the principal Russian war aim of the first campaign. But it could not be taken if the Ottomans controlled the Liman. Furthermore, the loss of the battle would leave the Turks free to attack Kinburn again, advance fifteen miles upstream to Kherson and possibly take the Crimea. Potemkin's strategy was to win naval control of the Liman and then besiege mighty Ochakov, which would open communications between Kherson and Sebastopol, protect the Crimea and win a new expanse of coastline. So all depended on the Prince de Nassau- Siegen, Rear-Admiral John Paul Jones and the Crocodile of Sea Battles.

On 27 May, Potemkin marched out of Elisabethgrad with his army as the Capitan-Pasha gathered his fleet. On the morning of 7 June, the Capitan- Pasha advanced along the Liman with his rowing flotilla backed by his warships. It was a gorgeous and impressive sight - 'better than a ball at Warsaw', thought Nassau, 'and I'm persuaded we'll have as much fun as Prince Sapieha dancing "l'Allemande"'. Nassau and Damas showed each other portraits of their women back home. The Turks opened fire. While Jones's squadron was held back by a contrary wind, Nassau used the light Zaporogian chaiki on his left to attack them all along the line. The Turks withdrew in chaos. The Capitan-Pasha fired on his own retreating forces. He was, after all, the man who had solved the problem of lazy firefighting in Istanbul by tossing four firemen into a blaze pour encourager les autres.

Nassau and Jones ordered their respective fleets to give chase. Bentham, who was commanding a division of seven galleys and two gunboats, saw his heavy artillery win the day but got his eyebrows singed when one of his cannons exploded.⁷³ The First Battle of the Liman was more of a stalemate than a rout - but it was encouraging.

'It comes from God!', exclaimed Serenissimus, whose army was camped at Novy Grigory, where he had consecrated a church to his patron St George. He embraced Ligne.⁷⁴ Surprisingly in a man notorious for his indolence, Potemkin's concept of command was all-embracing and was combined with a mastery of detail. He supervised the flotilla's manoeuvring, its formations and the signalling codes between ships and Kinburn. He thought first about the ordinary men: he ordered Nassau to let each man have a portion of eau de vie (spirits) daily and he specified that meals were to be served on time, always hot, and had to include vegetable soup and meat on holy days. When summer came, the men were to wash daily. But most remarkable were his views on discipline. 'I am entirely persuaded', he wrote, that 'sentiments of humanity' contributed to the health of the troops and their service. 'To succeed in this, I recommend you to forbid the beating of people. The best remedy is to explain exactly and clearly what you have done.' Contemporaries saw Potemkin's humanity and generosity to his men as mad, indulgent and dangerous. This would have been regarded as mollycoddling in the Royal Navy half a century later.⁷⁵

Nassau and Jones became rabid enemies: the reckless paladin was not impressed with Jones's sensible preservation of his ships, while Jones thought Nassau hated him because he had 'extracted him out of his foul-up and peril'.⁷⁶ Both complained to the Prince, who tried to keep the peace while secretly backing Nassau. 'It is to you alone', he wrote two days later, 'I attribute this victory.'⁷⁷ But he also ordered him to get on with Jones: 'Mod­erate a little your fine ardour.'⁷⁸

On 16 June, the Crocodile decided to overcome the stalemate by bringing his entire fleet, including battleships, into the Liman. 'Nothing could present a more formidable front that this line extending from shore to shore,' wrote Fanshawe, so densely packed that he could see no interval between their sails. The attack was imminent. That night, after the arrival of another twenty-two Russian gunboats, Nassau called a council of war. Jones declared, 'I see in your eyes the souls of heroes,' but advised caution. Nassau lost his temper, telling the American he could stay behind with his ships if he liked, and ordered a dawn pre-emptive strike. The two admirals were now fighting their own private war.

Damas led the assault on the right with his galleys, gun-batteries and bomb- ketches, while Bentham and Fanshawe backed by Jones's battleships, Vladimir and Alexander attacked the hulking Turkish ships-of-the-line. The Turks advanced towards them blowing trumpets, clashing cymbals and shouting to Allah but, rattled by the Russian pre-emptive strike, they soon tried to retreat. The flagships of their Vice-Admiral and then Ghazi Hassan himself became stuck on shoals. Damas' gunboats pounced on them, but Turkish fire managed to sink a smaller Russian boat. When Jones noticed the shoals, he stopped the pursuit with his ships-of-the-line. Prudence won him no friends. Bentham, Fanshawe and the rest pursued in their lighter gunboats. But the piece de resistance came in the afternoon when Damas succeeded in destroying the Crocodile's flagship. Its explosion was 'a magnificent spectacle', recalled Fanshawe.⁷⁹ The 'Algerine renegado' continued to command from the nearby spit. As night fell, the young Englishmen stepped up their chase. The Turks withdrew beneath the guns of Ochakov, leaving behind two destroyed ships- of-the-line and six gunboats.

Overnight, the old Crocodile withdrew the battleships that had lost him the battle, but as they passed the Kinburn spit Suvorov opened up with a battery, positioned for just such an opportunity. The two battleships and five frigates tried to avoid the bombardment but instead ran aground. They were clearly visible in the moonlight. During this lull, Jones made a secret reconnaissance and wrote in chalk on one warship's stern: 'To be Burned. Paul Jones 17/28 June'. Jones, Bentham and Damas rowed over to Nassau's flagship. There was another row between the admirals. 'I know how to capture ships as well as you!', shouted Nassau. 'I have proved my ability to capture ships that are not Turkish,' replied Jones pointedly. It was comments like this that made him enemies who would stop at nothing to destroy him.⁸⁰

Nassau and the young bloods decided to attack. Off they went helter- skelter in their boats to bombard these beached whales. 'We had about as much discipline', wrote Bentham, 'as the London mob.' Samuel fired so many shells that he could not even see his targets for the smoke. He captured one ship-of-the-line, but the 'London mob' was so keen for blood that they blew up the other Turkish ships with 3,000 of their rowing slaves still chained on board. Their screams must have been appalling. 'Dead bodies were floating around for a fortnight afterwards,' Samuel told his father.⁸¹ The rest of the fleet took refuge beneath the walls of Ochakov. The Capitan-Pasha executed a selection of his officers.⁸²

'Our victory is complete - my flotilla did it!', declared Nassau, soi-disant 'Master of the Liman'. In two days of the Second Battle of the Liman, the Turks had lost ten warships and five galleys with 1,673 prisoners and over 3,000 dead, while the Russians had lost just one frigate, eighteen dead and sixty-seven wounded. Damas was given the honour of taking the news to the Prince, waiting at Novy Grigory to cross the Bug.⁸³ This time Potemkin was beside himself. He kissed Ligne all over again: 'What did I tell you of Novy Grigory? Here again! Isn't it amazing? I'm the spoilt child of God.' Ligne coolly commented that this was 'the most extraordinary man there ever was'.⁸⁴ The Prince of Taurida exulted, 'The boats beat the ships. I've gone mad with joy!'⁸⁵

That night, the jubilant Potemkin arrived from the shore to dine with Nassau and Lewis Littlepage on Jones's flagship, the Vladimir. Potemkin's flag as grand admiral of the Black Sea and Caspian Fleets was piped up. Nassau and Jones were still at daggers drawn. 'So brilliant in the second rank,' Nassau commented of Jones, 'eclipsed in the first.'⁸⁶ The Prince- Marshal persuaded Nassau to apologize to the touchy American, but he was sure that the victories belonged to Nassau. 'It was all his work,' he reported to Catherine. As for the 'pirate' Jones, he was not 'a comrade-in-arms'.⁸⁷ The victory truly owed more to Bentham's artillery than to Nassau's 'mob'. Naturally Samuel thought so, and he was promoted to colonel,[89] and awarded the St George with a gold-hilted sword.⁸⁸ Catherine sent Potemkin a golden sword 'garnished with three big diamonds, the most beautiful thing possible', and a golden plate engraved 'To Field-Marshal Prince Potemkin of Taurida, commander of the land army and sea army victorious on the Liman and creator of the fleet'.⁸⁹ The prickly Jones got less than the brazen Nassau: the snub was clear. The chastened Crocodile of Sea Battles put to sea with the remains of his fleet.

Just when things were going so well, dangerous news arrived from Cath­erine: Gustavus III of Sweden had attacked Russia on 21 June, providing his own pretext by staging an attack against his own frontier, using Swedish troops in Russian uniforms.⁹⁰ Before leaving Stockholm to lead his troops in Finland, Gustavus boasted he would soon be taking 'luncheon in St Peters­burg'. The capital was exposed, for the crack Russian forces were in the south, though Potemkin had left an observation corps guarding the border, and sent Kalmyks and Bashkirs, with their spears and bows and arrows, to scare the Swedes. (They scared the Russians just as much.) Fortunately, the Baltic Fleet, under Greig, had not left to fight the Turks in the Mediterranean. Potemkin appointed Count Musin-Pushkin to command the Finnish front against Gustavus. Soon afterwards, Alexei Orlov-Chesmensky arrived in Petersburg to exploit the Prince's supposed negligence - an experience Cath­erine compared to having a 'load of snow'⁹¹ landing on her head. Petersburg soon felt as if it was a fortified town, she reported. The first sea battle on 6 July at Gothland was a victory for Russia, 'so my friend', she told her consort, 'I've also smelt powder'.⁹² But Gustavus was still advancing on land. In one of those moments when Potemkin envisaged ruthless evacuations of people, he half jokingly suggested depopulating Finland, dispersing its people and making it into a wasteland.⁹³

Unfortunately, Sweden was just the tip of the iceberg. England, Holland and Prussia were about to sign a Triple Alliance that would turn out to be strongly anti-Russian. France was paralysed by imminent revolution. But Catherine found herself astride the two faultlines of Europe - Russia versus Turkey and Austria versus Prussia. The jealous Prussia, under its new king Frederick William, was determined to squeeze advantage out of Russo-Aus- trian prizes against the Turks and keen to feast again on the juicy cake of Poland - a menu of desires that the Prussian Chancellor Count von Hertzberg would bring together in his eponymous Plan. Austria felt exposed to Prussian attack in its rear, but Russia assured Joseph this would not be allowed to happen. The pressure increased on Potemkin again; Russia was back in crisis.⁹⁴

On 1 July, Potemkin led his army across The Bug to invest Ochakov, while Nassau launched a raid on the ships left under its walls: after another battle, the Turks abandoned the ships and scampered back into the fortress. Two hours later, Fanshawe heard Potemkin attack the town.⁹⁵ Serenissimus mounted his horse and advanced on Ochakov at the head of 13,000 Cossacks and 4,000 Hussars. The garrison welcomed them with a barrage followed by the sortie of 600 Spahis and 300 infantry. The Prince immediately placed twenty cannon on the plain beneath the fortress and stood personally directing the fire, 'where all the immense diamonds of the beautiful portrait of the Empress that is always in his buttonhole, attracted fire'. Two horses and a cart driver were killed beside him.

Ligne acclaimed Potemkin's 'beautiful valour', but Catherine was unim­pressed. 'If you kill yourself,' she wrote, 'you kill me too. Show me the mercy of forbearing from such fun in the future.'⁹⁶ So began the siege of Ochakov.

CRY HAVOC: THE STORMING OF OCHAKOV

It began in the morning At the rise of a red sun When Potemkin speaks... Our bravest leader

Only wave your hand and Ochakov is taken

Say the word and Istanbul will fall

We'll march with you through fire and rain...

Soldiers' marching song, The Fall of Ochakov'

The forbidding fortress of Ochakov was Russia's most pressing prize in 1788 because it controlled the mouths of the Dnieper and the Bug. This was the key to Kherson, hence to the Crimea itself. The Turks had therefore reinforced its network of defences, advised by 'a French engineer of note', Lafite. 'The town', observed Fanshawe, 'formed a long parallelogram from the crest of a hill down to the waterside, fortified with a wall of considerable thickness running round it, a double ditch ... flanked by six bastions, a spit of sand running out from the west flank into the Liman which flanks the sea wall and terminates in a covered battery.'¹ It was a considerable town of mosques, palaces, gardens and barracks with a garrison of between 8,000 and 12,000 Spahis and Janissaries, dressed in their green jackets and tunics over pan­taloons with turbans, shields, curved daggers, axes and spears.[90] Even Joseph II, who inspected Ochakov on his visit, appreciated that it was not susceptible to a coup de main.²

As soon as he began to invest the fortress Serenissimus insisted on setting off with Ligne, Nassau and his entourage in a rowing boat to reconnoitre and test some mortars. Ochakov saluted the Prince with a bombardment and sent out a squadron of Turks in little boats. Potemkin haughtily ignored them.

'One could see nothing more noble and cheerfully courageous than the Prince,' said Ligne. 'I loved him to madness that day.'³ Potemkin's demonstrations of valour impressed everyone - especially a few weeks later when Sinelnikov, Governor of Ekaterinoslav, was hit in the groin by a cannonball while standing between an imperturbable Potemkin and an excited Ligne. Serenissimus ordered the reduction of a Turkish stronghold in the Pasha's gardens. This ignited a skirmish which Potemkin and 200 courtiers observed from amid the barrage. 'I've not seen a man', said Nassau, 'who was better under fire than he.'⁴ Potemkin rushed to help Sinelnikov, who, ever the courtier, even in agony, asked him 'not to expose himself to such danger because there's only one Potemkin in Russia'. The pain was so excruciating, he begged Potemkin to shoot him.⁵ Sinelnikov died two days later.⁶

The Prince extended both wings of his forces in an arc around the town and ordered a bombardment by his artillery. Everyone waited for the storming to begin - especially Suvorov, who was always longing to unleash the bloody bayonet, if not the 'crazy bitch' of the musket.

Next day, on 27 July, the Turks made a sortie with fifty Spahis. Suvorov, 'drunk after dinner', attacked them, throwing more and more men into a fierce fray, without orders from Potemkin. The Turks fled but returned with superior forces to pursue Suvorov and his Russians back to their lines, killing many of his best men, who were then beheaded. When Potemkin sent a note to inquire what was happening, Suvorov is supposed to have sent back this rhyming couplet:

I am sitting on a rock

And at Ochakov I look.⁷

Three thousand Turks fell on the fleeing Russians. Damas called it 'useless butchery'.⁸ Suvorov was wounded and the rest of his division was saved only by Prince Repnin making a diversion. The heads of the Russians were dis­played on stakes around Ochakov.

Serenissimus wept at the waste of 200 soldiers, 'due to the humanity and compassion of his heart', according to his secretary Tsebrikov. 'Oh my god!', cried Potemkin. 'You're happy to let those barbarians tear everybody to pieces.' He angrily reprimanded Suvorov, saying 'soldiers are not so cheap that one can sacrifice them .. Л⁹ Suvorov sulked and recuperated in Kinburn.[91]

Potemkin did not storm Ochakov. The pressure on him increased all the time: on 18 August, the Turks made another sortie. General Mikhail Golenishev-Kutuzov, later the legendary hero of 1812 and vanquisher of Napoleon, was wounded in the head for the second time - like Potemkin, he was blinded in one eye.[92] Nassau repulsed the Turks by firing on their flanks from his flotilla in the Estuary. As winter descended on Ochakov, the foreigners - such as Ligne and Nassau - grumbled bitterly about Potemkin's slow incompetence. Nassau considered Potemkin the 'most unmilitary man in the world and too proud to consult anybody'.! Ligne said he was wasting 'time and people' and wrote to Cobenzl in code, undermining Potemkin - though he did not dare sneak to Catherine.¹⁰ 'It is impossible', wrote Damas, who thought the batteries badly laid out around the town, 'that so many blunders should have been made unless Prince Potemkin had personal reasons ... to delay matters.' But these foreigners were prejudiced against Russia. Potemkin's reasons were political and military.¹¹ Serenissimus was happy to let the Austrians absorb the first Ottoman attacks, especially since Joseph had failed in virtually all his plans except the meagre prize of Sabatsch and had himself gone on to the defensive. Catherine heartily agreed: 'Better be slower but healthy than quick but dangerous.'¹² Given the Swedish war, the increas­ingly hostile Anglo-Prussian alliance and the surprisingly strong performance of the Ottoman armies against Austria, Potemkin knew Ochakov would not end the war: there was every reason to husband resources until the end of the year.

Serenissimus was not a genius of movement, more a Fabius Cunctator, a patient delayer and waiter on events. This was an age in which officers like Ligne and Suvorov believed warfare was a glorious game of charges and assaults, regardless of the cost in men. Potemkin threw away the book of conventional Western warfare and fought in a way that suited the nature of his enemies - and himself. He much preferred to win battles without fighting them, as in 1783 in the Crimea. In the case of sieges, he preferred to bribe, negotiate and starve a fortress into submission. His attitude was not swash­buckling, but modern generals would recognize his humanity and prudence.¹³ Potemkin specifically decided that he would not storm Ochakov until it was absolutely necessary, in order to save the blood of his men. 'I'll do my best', he told Suvorov, 'to get it cheap.'¹⁴ Potemkin's emissaries rode back and forth negotiating with the Turks. Serenissimus 'was convinced the Turks wish to surrender'.¹⁵ Storming was his last resort-ф The foreigners also had little concept of his vast responsibilities, commanding and provisioning armies and navies from the Caucasus to the Gulf of Finland, from managing Polish policy to driving Faleev to create another rowing flotilla, already looking ahead to the next year's fight up the Danube.¹⁶

'I won't be the dupe of the Russians who want to leave me alone to bear the entire burden,'¹⁷ Joseph bitterly complained to Ligne. Joseph's desperation to share the burden was the reason for Ligne's frantic and venomous attempts to force Potemkin either to storm Ochakov or to bear the blame for Joseph's failures. In September, the ablest Ottoman commander, Grand Vizier Yusuf- Pasha, surprised Joseph in his camp and the Kaiser barely escaped with his life, fleeing back to Vienna. Joseph learned the hard way that he was not Frederick the Great. 'As for our ally,' Potemkin joked, 'whenever he's around, everything goes wrong.'[93] The Turks had certainly improved their military skills since the last war - 'the Turks are different', Potemkin told Catherine, 'and the devil has taught them'. The Austrians could not understand why Catherine did not order Potemkin to storm, but 'she negotiates with him for everything'. Half the time, he did not even reply to her letters. 'He has decided to do what he wants.'¹⁸

The Prince often played billiards with Ligne until 6 a.m. or just stayed up to chat. One night, Ligne gave him a dinner for fifty generals and all his exotic friends.¹⁹ Potemkin was often depressed and then he would 'put his handkerchief dipped in lavender water around his forehead, sign of his hypochondria'. During the heat, he served icecreams and sorbets. At night, Ligne and the rest of them listened to his 'numerous and unique orchestra conducted by the famous and admirable Sarti'. There is a story that during one of these recitals, as the horns were piping, Potemkin in his dressing gown asked a German artillery officer: 'What do you think of Ochakov?' 'You think the walls of Ochakov are like those of Jericho^rfiat fell to the sound of trumpets?', replied the officer.²⁰

There were consolations of the feminine kind when they were rejoined by the three graces, whom Ligne called 'the most beautiful girls in the Empire'.²¹ The Prince was falling in love with Pavel Potemkin's wife. Praskovia And- reevna, nee Zakrevskaya, had a bad figure but a 'superb face, skin of dazzling whiteness and beautiful eyes, little intelligence but very self-sufficient'. Her arch notes to Potemkin survive in the archives: 'You mock me, my dear cousin, in telling me as an excuse that you await my orders to come to see me ... I am always charmed.'²² Damas was equally charmed by Potemkin's libidinous niece-by-marriage, the twenty-five-year-old Ekaterina Samoilova. Her portrait by Lampi shows a bold, full-lipped sexuality with jewels in her hair and a turban tottering on the back of her head. When she later had children, the wags joked that her husband, Samoilov, never saw her - but she still provided ample 'proof of her fecundity'.²³ After a freezing day in the trenches, Damas, who dashingly sported French and Russian uniform on 4<э8 the apogee

alternate days, visited the ladies' tent: 'I hoped that a more energetic siege would make them surrender more quickly than the town.' He soon succeeded with Samoilova, but was then wounded again. Potemkin consoled his protege by bringing Skavronskaya, another newly arrived sultana, to his sickbed.²⁴ The Prince did not want to deprive Damas of 'seeing one of the prettiest women in Europe'.[94]

The Capitan-Pasha met the Sebastopol Fleet off Fidonise, near the Danube delta, on 3 July and Potemkin's baby passed its first test - just. Ghazi Hassan withdrew and now returned to save Ochakov. The Crocodile delivered supplies and another 1,500 Janissaries for the garrison. Twice the supplies got through - much to the admirals' shame and Potemkin's fury. But the entire Turkish fleet was again cooped up under the walls of Ochakov and therefore neutralized: as ever, there was some method in Potemkin's madness.

On 5 September, the Prince, Nassau, Damas and Ligne sailed into the Liman to examine the Hassan-Pasha Redoubt and discuss Nassau's plan to land 2,000 men under the wall of the lower battery. The Turks opened up with grapeshot and shell. Potemkin sat alone in the stern, with his medals glittering on his chest and an expression of 'cold dignity that was deliberately assumed and truly admirable'.²⁵

Potemkin's entourage, particularly his strange band of neophyte admirals and foreign spies, began to disband with mutual disillusionment. Life at Ochakov became harder. 'We have no water,' wrote Ligne, 'we eat flies and we're a 100 leagues from a market. We only drink wine ... we sleep four hours after dinner.' Bitter winter came early. Ligne burned his carriage for firewood. The camp became 'snow and shit'. Even the Liman was green from the burned bodies of Turks.²⁶

Samuel Bentham, appalled by the stench of decay and dysentery, called war 'an abominable trade'. Potemkin indulgently sent him to the Far Eastf on the sort of mission that appealed to both of them.²⁷ The King of Poland's eyes, Littlepage, stormed off when Potemkin suspected him of trying to undermine Nassau. The little American protested he had never been 'a troublemaker'. Serenissimus soothed him and he went back to Stanislas-Augustus.²⁸ The real victim of this parting of the ways was America's famous sailor John Paul Jones, whose obscure origins meant he was always under pressure to prove himself. His thin-skinned, pedantic behaviour did not endear him to Ser- enissimus. When Nassau was promoted rear-admiral, Jones got into a ludi­crous row about his own precedence and salutes - his account gave six reasons why he need not salute Nassau!

Soon anything that went wrong at sea was blamed on poor Jones. Potemkin ordered the American to destroy ships, moored off Ochakov, or at least spike their cannons. Jones tried twice but for some reason did not succeed. Potemkin cancelled the order and assigned it to Anton Golavaty and his beloved Zaporogian Cossacks, who accomplished it. Jones complained rudely to the Prince who replied: 'I assure you Mr Rear-Admiral that in command, I never enter into individual considerations, I give justice when I should render it... As for my orders, I am not obliged to give account of them and I changed these same orders according to circumstance ... I've commanded a long time and I know very well its rules.'²⁹ Serenissimus decided Jones was 'unable to command' and had him recalled by Catherine.³⁰ 'I'll eternally regret having had the misfortune to losing your good graces,' Jones told Potemkin on 20 October. 'I dare say it's difficult but very possible to find sea officers of my skill... but you'll never find a man with a heart as susceptible to loyalty with more zeal .. .'.^3I At a last interview, Jones bitterly blamed Potemkin for dividing the command in the first place. 'Agreed,' snapped the Prince- Marshal, 'but it's too late now.'³² On 29 October, Jones departed for Peters­burg,³³ where he soon learned the danger of making powerful enemies.

After another attempt to bombard the town into submission by land and sea, Nassau, irritated by the delay and out of favour as Potemkin discovered his devious manipulations of truth, stormed off to Warsaw. 'His luck didn't hold,' Potemkin told Catherine.³⁴

Joseph's spy Ligne left too. Potemkin wrote him the 'sweetest, tenderest, most naive' goodbye. Ligne apologized for hurting his friend in an unpub­lished semi-legible note to the Prince - 'Pardon, 1000 Pardons, my Prince' - that has the air of a rejected lover on the eve of parting.³⁵ Potemkin, 'sometimes the best of men', seemed to awaken out of a dream to say goodbye to Ligne: 'he took me in his arms for a long time, repeatedly ran after me, started again and finally let me go with pain'. But when he reached Vienna Ligne told everyone that Ochakov would never be taken and set about ruining Pot­emkin's reputation.³⁶ So young Roger de Damas lost his two patrons. The Prince offered himself to replace them as 'friend and protector'. Thus Pot­emkin, who went from 'most perfect graciousness' to 'the most morose rudeness' in seconds, inspired 'gratitude, devotion and hatred at the same moment'.³⁷

Catherine worried about her Prince's glory and consort's comfort: she sent him the commemorative dish and sword for the former, and a jewel and a fur coat for the latter. Potemkin was delighted: 'Thank you, Lady Matushka ...'. The jewels showed 'royal generosity' and the fur displayed 'maternal caring.

And this', he added with feeling, 'is more dear to me than beads and gold.'³⁸

*

The weather at Ochakov and the politics in Europe deteriorated together at the end of the October. The cold was now severe. When Potemkin inspected the trenches, he told the soldiers they did not need to rise at his approach: 'Only try not to lie down before the Turkish cannons.' Soon the sufferings of the army were 'inconceivable' in the snow and ice with temperatures of minus 15 degrees Centigrade. The men rolled up their tents and lived in burrows in the ground that shocked Damas, though actually these zemliankas were the traditional Russian way for the troops to camp in the cold. There was hardly any food, meat or brandy. Potemkin and Damas received the latest news from France. 'Do you think that when your King has assembled the States-General ... he will dine at the hour that pleases him?' Potemkin asked him. 'Hell, he will only eat when they are kind enough to permit it!'

Soon it was so bad that even Samoilova had to go and camp with her husband, who commanded the left wing. This caused her lover Damas con­siderable inconvenience: 'I was forced to take my chance of being frozen in the snow in order to pay her the attentions she deigned to accept.'³⁹

The misery of the army was the 'absolute fault of Prince Potemkin', Cobenzl told Joseph. 'It's he who lost a whole year before unhappy Ochakov where the army has suffered more by illness and lack of substance than it would have lost in two battles.'⁴⁰ Potemkin's critics, especially the Austrians, claimed his delay caused the death of 20,000 men and 2,000 horses, according to the prejudiced Frenchman, the Comte de Langeron, who was not even there.⁴¹ Forty to fifty men were said to be dying daily in the hospital.⁴² 'Scarcely any man recovers from dysentery.'⁴³ It is hard to discover how many really died, but Potemkin certainly lost fewer men than earlier generals like Munnich and Rumiantsev-Zadunaisky, both of whose armies were so decimated they could scarcely campaign. The Austrians, who damned him over Ochakov, were in no position to criticize: at exactly the same time, 172,000 of their soldiers were sick; and 33,000 died, more than Potemkin's entire army.⁴⁴

Yet the foreigners mocked Potemkin's generosity and care of his troops while complaining simultaneously about his brutal indifference. Samoilov, who lived with his forces, admitted there was an 'extraordinary freeze but our troops did not suffer' because Potemkin ensured that they had trench fur- coats, hats and kengi - fur or felt galoshes pulled over their boots - in addition to special tents. They were supplied with meat and vodka and 'hot punch of Riga balsam'.⁴⁵

Serenissimus distributed a great deal of money among the troops in the field, 'which made them spoilt ... without relieving their wants', claimed Damas, with breathtaking aristocratic prejudice and disdain for the ordinary soldiers.⁴⁶ Russians understood him better. Potemkin was, wrote his secretary, 'naturally disposed to love humanity'. As for the care of the dying, Tsebrikov saw forty hospital tents that were placed beside Potemkin's tent at his express order so they would be better treated: the Prince visited them to check, the sort of care and concern rarely shown by British generals sixty years later during the Crimean War. Yet Tsebrikov also met a convoy of carts returning from the army, each carrying the bodies of three or four men.⁴⁷ The army did suffer, many died, but Potemkin's medical care, money, food, clothes and humanitarianism, unparalleled in Russia, may explain the army's survival.

Finally a deserter informed Serenissimus that the Turkish Seraskier (commander) would never surrender and had executed the officers with whom he had been negotiating.⁴⁸ The Prince still waited.

The Empress herself was becoming impatient. Russia was still at war on two fronts, but the Swedish front had been improved by Greig's defeat of the Swedish navy at Gothland and by the intervention of Denmark, which attacked Sweden's rear. In August, England, Prussia and Holland concluded their Triple Alliance. In Poland, the pent-up resentment of Russian domination exploded in a celebration of liberty. 'A great hatred has risen against us in Poland,' Catherine told Potemkin on 27 November.⁴⁹ She tried to negotiate the treaty with Poland along the traditional lines, but Prussia outbid her by proposing a treaty that offered the Poles the hope of a stronger constitution and freedom from Russia. Catherine was losing Poland, but Potemkin could free her hands by making a quick peace with the Turks.

'Do please write to me about this quickly and in detail,' the Empress told the Prince, 'so I won't miss anything important and, after the capture of Ochakov, endeavour most of all to start peace negotiations.'⁵⁰ The ever adaptable Potemkin had already warned Catherine to realign herself closer to Prussia and proposed his Polish alliance: his suggestions had been ignored and his warnings had turned out to be right. He wanted to resign again.⁵¹ The Poles, backed now by Prussia, demanded the withdrawal of all Russian troops from their Commonwealth, even though the Russian army in the south depended on Poland for its winter quarters and most of its supplies. It was a further blow. 'If you retire ...', Catherine told him, 'I'll take it as a deathblow.' She begged him to capture Ochakov and place the army in winter quarters. 'There is nothing in the world I want more than your coming here ...', partly to see him after such a long time and partly 'to discuss a lot with you tete-a- tete\^5Z

The Prince could not resist saying 'I told you so' to Catherine: 'It's bad in Poland which it wouldn't have been of course with my project but that's how it is.' He proposed pulling the teeth of the Triple Alliance by putting out feelers to Prussia and England and making peace with Sweden. His letter reads like an order to an empress: 'You'll work out later how to get revenge.'⁵³ The secret reports of his homme d'affaires, Garnovsky, from Petersburg suggested that the discontent about Potemkin's handling of Ochakov had now spread to Catherine. The Court had been displeased with the delay as early as August. Alexander Vorontsov and Zavadovsky undermined Pot­emkin's position and resisted his desire for rapprochement with England and

Prussia. Catherine was 'dissatisfied'.⁵⁴ Only the arrival of Serenissimus himself would alleviate her state of confusion and vacillation.⁵⁵

When the remains of the Turkish fleet retired to port for the winter on 4 November, leaving the garrison alone, Potemkin made his plans.⁵⁶ In late November, the entire cavalry was dismissed to go into winter quarters, a miserable and often fatal march through the snowy wilderness.⁵⁷ Back at the siege, the Turks made a sortie on 11 November against one of the Potemkin's batteries and killed General S.P. Maximovich, whose head then lolled forlornly on the battlements.⁵⁸ Lavish snowfalls delayed the denouement.[95]

On 27 November Catherine begged him: Take Ochakov and make peace with the Turks.'⁵⁹ On 1 December, Potemkin signed his plan to storm the fortress with six columns of roughly 5,000 men each, which would give 30,000, but Fanshawe claimed only 14,500 were left.⁶⁰ Samoilov, who led one of the columns, says the Prince had waited deliberately until the Liman itself was frozen, so that Ochakov could also be attacked from the sea.⁶¹ On the 5th, the order of battle was set during a war council. Damas was assigned to spearhead the column storming the Stamboul Gate. He prepared to die by writing an adieu to his sister, returning the love letters of his Parisian mistress, the Marquise de Coigny - and then spending the evening with his Russian one, Samoilova, until 2 a.m., when he crept back to his tent.

Potemkin himself passed the most important night of his life so far in a dug-out in the forward trenches. The Prince's stubborn valet actually refused to admit Repnin, who had arrived to inform him that the assault was about to start, because he did not dare awaken his master: 'an example of passive obedience unimaginable in any country but Russia'. The Prince of Taurida prayed as the men advanced.⁶²

At 4 a.m. on 6 December, three shells gave the signal. With shouts of hurrah, the columns charged forward towards the entrenchments. The Turks resisted wildly. The Russians gave them no quarter. Damas stormed the Stamboul Gate with his Grenadiers. The moment they were inside, 'the most horrible and unparalleled massacre began forthwith', earning Frederick the Great's nickname for them - 'les oursomanes', half-bear, half-psychopath.⁶³

The Russian soldiers went almost mad with 'fury': even when the garrison surrendered, they ran through the streets killing every man, woman and child they could find - between 8,000 and 11,000 Turks in all - 'like a strong whirlwind', Potemkin told Catherine, 'that in a moment tossed people on to their hearses'.⁶⁴ This was literally havoc, justified by the Russians as holy war against the infidel. The Turks were killed in such numbers and in such density that they fell in piles, over which Damas and his men trampled, their legs sinking into bleeding bodies. 'We found ourselves covered in gore and shat­tered brains' - but inside the town. The bodies were so closely packed that Damas had to advance by stepping from body to body until his left foot slipped into a heap of gore, three or four corpses deep, and straight into the mouth of a wounded Turk underneath. The jaws clamped so hard on his heel that they tore away a piece of his boot.⁶⁵

There was so much plunder that soldiers captured handfuls of diamonds, pearls and gold that could be bought round the camp the next day for almost nothing. No one even bothered to steal silver. Potemkin saved an emerald the size of an egg for his Empress.⁶⁶ 'Turkish blood flowed like rivers,' Russian soldiers sang as they marched into the next century. 'And the Pasha fell to his knees before Potemkin.'⁶⁷

The Seraskier of Ochakov, a tough old pasha, was brought bare-headed before Serenissimus, who veered between grief and exultation. 'We owe this bloodshed to your obstinacy,' said the Prince. If Ochakov had surrendered, they could have avoided all this. The Seraskier seemed surprised to find a commander so moved by the loss of life. 'I've done my duty,' shrugged Seraskier Hussein-Pasha, 'and you yours. Fate turned against us.' He had only persisted, he added with Oriental flattery, in order to render His High- ness's victory all the more brilliant. Potemkin ordered that the Seraskier's lost turban be found in the ruins.

By 7 a.m., after four hours of savage fighting, Ochakov was Russian.* Potemkin ordered a stop to the slaughter, which was instantly obeyed. Special measures were taken to protect the clothes and jewels of women and to look after the wounded. All witnesses, even the foreigners, agreed that Potemkin's assault was 'excellent' and shrewdly planned in relation to the fortifications.⁶⁸

The Prince entered Ochakov with his entourage and seraglio - 'handsome Amazons who delighted', according to the Grand Dukes' mathematics tutor Charles Masson, 'in visiting fields of battle and admiring the fine corpses of Turks as they lay on their backs, scimitars in hand'.⁶⁹ Stories already aboun­ded, even before detailed reports had reached Petersburg, of Potemkin's luxurious negligence towards the wounded. 'As they rarely report the truth about me,' Potemkin corrected the gossip to Catherine, 'they lie here too.' Serenissimus turned his palatial tent into a hospital, moving to live in a small dug-out.⁷⁰

Damas ran up to join Potemkin and his 'nieces' - especially Ekaterina Samoilova, who evidently gave him a delicious prize. 'This particular form of happiness ... has never before rewarded any man so promptly for a morning of such cruel joy. Most men have to wait until they return to their capital,'

including Samoilova's long-suffering husband, no doubt.⁷¹

Lieutenant-Colonel Bauer, the fastest world traveller in Russia, galloped off to inform the Empress. When he arrived, Catherine was asleep, ill and tense. Mamonov awoke her. 'I was poorly,' said the Empress, 'but you have cured me.' Potemkin wrote to her the next day - 'I congratulate you with the fortress,' 310 cannons and 180 banners; 9,500 Turks were killed and 2,500 Russians. 'Oh, how sorry I am for them,' wrote the Prince.⁷²

Massacres are easy to make and hard to clear up. There were so many Turkish bodies that they could not all be buried, even if the ground had been soft enough to do so. The cadavers were piled in carts and taken out to the Liman where they were dumped on the ice. Still moist with gore, they froze there into macabre blood-blackened pyramids. The Russian ladies took their sledges out on to the ice to admire them.⁷³

Catherine was triumphant: 'I take you by the ears with both my hands and kiss you, my dear friend ... You've shut everybody's mouths and this suc­cessful event gives you the chance to show generosity to those who criticize you blindly and stupidly.'⁷⁴ No longer able to hide their incompetence behind Potemkin, the Austrians were almost disappointed. 'Taking Ochakov is very advantageous to continue the war,' Joseph told Kaunitz in Vienna. 'But not to make peace.'⁷⁵ Courtiers now laughed at Ligne, who had been 'singing at the top of his voice' that Ochakov would not be taken that year.⁷⁶ Potemkin's critics rushed to write sycophantic letters.⁷⁷ 'There's a man who never goes by the ordinary road,' said Littlepage, 'but still arrives at his goal.'⁷⁸

'Те Deums' were sung on 16 December to the boom of 101 cannons. 'Public joy was great.' Bauer, promoted to colonel and presented with a gold snuff­box with diamonds, was sent back bearing a diamond-set star of St George and a diamond-encrusted sword, worth 60,000 roubles, for the Prince of Taurida.⁷⁹ Potemkin was exhausted but did not rest on his laurels. There was much to do before he could return to Petersburg. In one of his bursts of euphoric energy, he inspected the new naval yards at Vitovka, decided to found a new town called Nikolaev, then toured Kherson to review the fleet. But his most important job was to garrison Ochakov, send the fleet back to Sebastopol, convert the Turkish prizes into sixty-two-gun ships-of-the-line, and settle the army in winter quarters. This was no easy task, since Poland was increasingly hostile, emboldened by the Anglo-Prussian alliance.

The Prince called again for ditente with Prussia. Catherine disagreed and suggested western European affairs were her department. 'My lady, I am not a cosmopolitan,' replied Potemkin. 'I don't give a jot about Europe but, when it intervenes in affairs entrusted to me, there's no way I can be indifferent.' This is clear evidence of the partners' division of responsibilities and Pot­emkin's refusal to be bound by even that. As for the Prussians, 'I'm not in love with the Prussian King' nor afraid of his troops. He just thought 'they should be disdained less than the rest'.⁸⁰

At last, Serenissimus headed towards Petersburg. 'I shall take you there myself,' he told Damas. 'We mustn't be separated. I myself will undertake the arrangements.'⁸¹ The sledges were ready. The Prince and Damas climbed into those cockpits like baby's cradles and wrapped themselves in furs and leather. 'Are you ready?', Potemkin's muffled voice called to Damas. 'I've ordered that you are to stay close to me.' A lackey jumped on to the seats on the back of the sledges and whipped the horses, which sped into the night, escorted on all sides by Cossacks holding burning torches. Damas was left behind, only catching up at Mogilev. He just wanted to sleep; but, wherever the Prince arrived, the local governors and nobility had the garrison on parade and a fete awaiting him. Damas was led straight out of his sledge and into a 'magnificent ball', where 'the whole town were assembled'. The Prince waved aside Damas' worries about either his clothes or his fatigue, summoned all the girls and 'without further ado, he brought me a partner, whereupon ... I danced until six in the morning'. By noon, they were on the road again.⁸²

Petersburg awaited the Prince's return with the dread and excitement of the Second Coming. 'AH the town is worried by waiting for His Highness,' reported Garnovsky. 'There is no other conversation except this.' The dip­lomats watched the road - especially the Prussians and the English. A British diplomat got drunk at Naryshkin's and shouted a toast to Potemkin. One disappointed but ever hopeful American corsair, John Paul Jones, also eagerly anticipated the Prince, who would decide his destiny. 'The Prince has not yet arrived,' Zavadovsky complained to Field-Marshal Rumiantsev-Zadunaisky. 'Without him - nothing.'⁸³

Catherine followed his swift journey, which reminded of her of a bird's migration, 'and you wonder why you get tired. If you arrive here ill, I'll pull your ears at our first encounter - however glad I am to see you.'⁸⁴ But Catherine remained edgy, besieged on all sides by wars, coalitions and Court intrigues. Mamonov was a comfort but little help in affairs of state: besides he was now always ill. Catherine fretted about her consort's welcome - especially when she realized that she had raised triumphal arches to Prince Orlov and Rumiantsev-Zadunaisky yet forgotten Serenissimus. 'But Your Majesty knows him so well that she does not need to keep accounts,' replied her secretary, Khrapovitsky. 'True,' she said, 'but he's human too and maybe he'd like it.' So she ordered the marble gate at Tsarskoe Selo illuminated and decorated with an appropriately ambiguous ode by her Court poet, Petrov: 'You'll enter Sophia Cathedral with clapping.' This referred to Istanbul's Agia Sophia again. Catherine mused that Potemkin might 'be in Constantinople this year but don't tell me about it all of a sudden'.⁸⁵ The road was lit up for six miles, day and night. The guns of the fortress were to be fired - the prerogative of the Sovereign. 'Is the Prince loved in the town?', she asked her valet, Zakhar Zotov. 'Only by God and You,' he bravely replied. Catherine did not mind. She said she was too ill to let him go to the south again. 'My God,' she murmured, 'I need the Prince now.'⁸⁶

At 6 p.m. on Sunday, 4 February 1789, Serenissimus arrived in Petersburg in the midst of a ball for the birthday of Grand Duke Paul's daughter. Potemkin went straight to his apartments in the house adjoining the Winter Palace. The Empress left the festivities and surprised the Prince as he was changing. She stayed with him a long time.⁸⁷

MY SUCCESSES ARE YOURS

We shall glorify Potemkin

We shall plait him a bouquet in our hearts.

Russian soldiers' marching song, 'The Moldavian Campaign of 1790'

The favour of the Empress was agreeable; And though the duty waxed a little hard,

Young people at his time of life should be able To come off handsomely in that regard.

Lord Byron, Don Juan, Canto X: 22

On 11 February 1789, two hundred Ottoman banners from Ochakov were marched past the Winter Palace by a squadron of Life-Guards accompanied by four blaring trumpeters. The parade was followed by a splendid dinner in Potemkin's honour.¹ The Prince we see is extremely affable and gracious to everyone - we celebrate his arrival every day,' Zavadovsky sourly told Rumiantsev-Zadunaisky. 'All faith is in one person.'² Potemkin received another 100,000 roubles for the Taurida Palace, a diamond-studded baton and, most importantly of all, the retirement of Rumiantsev-Zadunaisky, commander of the Ukraine Army. The Prince was appointed commander of both armies.

Potemkin liberally distributed honours to his men: he insisted Suvorov, whom he brought to Petersburg with him, should receive a plume of diamonds for his hat with a 'K' for Kinburn.³ He ordered his favoured general straight down to Rumiantsev's old command, where the Turks were already launching raids.[96] The Prince promised Suvorov his own separate corps.⁴

The festivities could dispel neither the tension of Russia's international position nor Catherine's private anguish. After the dinner that night, Catherine quarrelled with her favourite, Mamonov. 'Tears,' noted Khrapovitsky, 'the evening was spent in bed.' Mamonov was behaving ominously: he was often 418 the apogee

ill, unfriendly or just absent. When Catherine asked the Prince about it, he replied, 'Haven't you been jealous of Princess Shcherbatova,' (a maid-of- honour) adding, 'Isn't there an affaire d'amourV He then repeated 'a hundred times': 'Oh Matushka, spit on him.'⁵ Potemkin could hardly have warned her more clearly about her lover. But Catherine, tired and almost sixty, did not listen.

She was so used to hearing what she wanted and so accustomed to her routine with Mamonov that she did not rise to Potemkin's warnings. Besides, Serenissimus turned against every favourite at one time or another. So the trouble with Mamonov continued - 'more tears' recorded Khrapovitsky the next day. Catherine spent all day in bed and her consort came to the rescue. 'After dinner, Prince G.A. Potemkin of Taurida acted as peacemaker' between the Empress and Mamonov.⁶ But he only papered over the cracks in the relationship. Nor could the Prince solve all of Russia's problems.

The leadership was divided over Russia's worsening position. While it held its own on two fronts against the Turks and Swedes, Russia's power was haemorrhaging in Poland. The Polish 'Four Year Sejm', now encouraged by Berlin, was enthusiastically, if naively, dismantling the Russian protectorate and throwing itself into the arms of Prussia. 'Great hatred'⁷ of Russia was driving Poland towards reform of its constitution and war with Catherine. Prussia cynically backed the idealism of the Polish 'Patriots' - even though Frederick William's true interest was the partition, not the reform, of Poland.

That was not all: Prussia and England were also working hard to keep Sweden and the Turks in the war. Pitt now hoped to recruit Poland to join a 'federative system' against the two imperial powers. This alarmed Vienna, where Joseph's health was failing - he was 'vomiting blood'. The Austrians fretted that Potemkin had become pro-Prussian. All Joseph could suggest to his Ambassador was to flatter the vanity of the 'all-powerful being'.⁸

So should Russia risk war with Prussia or come to an agreement with it, which meant making peace with the Turks, betraying the shaky Austrians and probably partitioning Poland, which would be compensated with Ottoman territory? This was the Gordian knot that Potemkin's long-awaited arrival was meant to cut.