Prince of Princes -The Life of Potemkin

Potemkin had for some time been advising Catherine to soften her obstinate contempt towards Frederick William. The Council expected him to try to persuade her to cut a deal because he knew that Russia could not fight Prussia and Poland as well as Turkey and Sweden. Since it was not yet time to make peace with the Sultan, Potemkin had to avoid war elsewhere. Serenissimus did not want a return to Panin's Prussian system, so he advised Catherine: 'Provoke the Prussian king to take whatever from Poland.'⁹ If he lulled the Prussian King into revealing the real greed of his Polish masquerade, the Poles would lose their love for Prussia.¹⁰ 'Sincerity', he told his ally Bezborodko,¹¹ 'is unnecessary in politics.'¹²

This visit also saw the end of his friendship with the French envoy, Segur, who had supported the criticisms of Ligne and Cobenzl during Ochakov. Segur was hurt: 'Your friendship for me has cooled a bit, mine won't ever imitate it. I'm devoted to you for life.'¹³ They had been discussing a Quadruple Alliance with the Bourbons and Habsburgs,¹⁴ but Britain was ever stronger, France ever weaker. 'I would have advised my Sovereign to ally with Louis the Fat, Louis the Young, Saint Louis, clever Louis XI, wise Louis XII, Louis the Great, even with Louis le Bien-Aime,' Serenissimus teased Segur, 'but not with Louis the Democrat.'¹⁵

Poor Segur, playing chess with the Prince, had to endure an entire evening of anti-French comic sketches from his Court 'fool' - Russian nobles still had clowns in their households. But he got his own back by bribing the fool to tease Potemkin about Russian military blunders. The Prince overturned the table and threw the chess pieces at the fleeing buffoon, but he saw Segur's joke and the evening ended 'most gaily'.¹⁶

Segur was about to turn detective, trawling the brothels and taverns of Petersburg on behalf of Potemkin's American 'pirate', Jones. In April, just as Potemkin was about to make Jones 'the happiest man alive' with a new job, the American was arrested and accused of paedophile rape. The story has the seedy gleam of a modern sex scandal. Jones appealed to Serenissimus: 'A bad woman has accused me of violating her daughter!' Worse, the daughter was said to be nine years old. He beseeched Potemkin: 'Shall it be said that, in Russia, a wretched woman, who eloped from her husband and family, stole away her daughter, lives here in a house of ill repute and leads a debauched and adulterous life, has found credit enough, on a simple complaint, unsup­ported by any proof, to affect the honour of a general officer of reputation, who has merited and received the decorations of America, France and this empire?' Jones, once a Parisian Lothario, admitted to Potemkin, 'I love women' and 'the pleasures that one only obtains from that sex, but to get such things by force, is horrible to me'.¹⁷

Potemkin, deluged with responsibilities and already disliking Jones, did not reply. The capital became a desert to Jones. Detective Segur was the only friend who supported his old American comrade and resolved to investigate who had framed him. He discovered that Jones had told Potemkin the truth - the accusing mother was a procuress who traded 'a vile traffic in young girls'. The girl, Katerina Goltzwart, was not nine but twelve, if not fourteen. She sold butter to guests at Jones's hotel, the London Tavern. In his statement to the chief of police three days after the incident, Jones admitted that the 'depraved girl' came several times to his room. He always gave her money. He claimed that he had not taken her virginity but 'each time she came chez moi, she lent herself with the best grace to all a man could want of her'.

Segur asked Potemkin to reinstate Jones and not charge him. The latter was possible but not the former. 'Thanks for what you tried to do for Paul Jones, even though you did not achieve what I wanted,' Segur wrote to the

Prince. 'Paul Jones is no more guilty than I, and a man of his rank has never suffered such humiliation, through the accusation of a woman, whose husband certifies she is a pimp and whose daughter solicits the inns.'¹⁸ Thanks to Segur's investigations and Potemkin's tepid help, Jones was not prosecuted and was received by Catherine one last time on 26 June 1789. Who framed Jones? Potemkin was above such vendettas. The English officers hated the American corsair enough to frame him, but Segur the detective concluded that Prince de Nassau-Siegen was the culprit.

Once back in Paris, Jones wrote a vainglorious account of the Liman and bombarded Potemkin with complaints about the medals he was owed. 'Time will teach you, my lord,' he wrote to Serenissimus on 13 July 1790, 'that I am neither a mountebank nor a swindler but a man loyal and true.'¹⁹

On 27 March, the pacific, wine-quaffing Sultan Abdul-Hamid I died. This made things worse, not better, for Russia because Selim III, his eighteen-year- old successor, was an aggressive, intelligent reformer whose determination to fight was buttressed by Moslem fanatics and the ambassadors of Prussia, England and Sweden. Austria and Russia wished to discuss peace with Selim in order to ward off a possible Prussian intervention in the Turkish War - but the augurs were not encouraging. The Austrian Chancellor, Kaunitz, wrote to Potemkin about Selim's ferocity, alleging that when he had once spotted a Polish Jew on the streets of Istanbul wearing the (wrong) yellow shoes, he had had him beheaded before the unfortunate had a chance to explain that he was a foreigner.²⁰ Peace could be won only on the battlefields in Potemkin's next campaign: no wonder Catherine was so anxious.

Potemkin and Catherine still flirted with one another. After her birthday reception at Paul's palace on 12 April, he sweetly boosted her flagging morale by complimenting the 'mother of her subjects, especially to me' and the 'angelic virtues' of the 'first-born eagle nestling', her grandson Alexander.²¹ Before he left he gave her an exquisite present, 'a so-called bagetelle,' she wrote to him, 'which is of rare beauty and, more to the point, as inimitable as you yourself. I marvel at both - it and you. You really are the personification of wit.'²²

On 6 May 1789, having laid plans with Catherine for every eventuality, including wars against Prussia and Poland, the Prince of Taurida left Tsarskoe Selo for the south. The old partners were not to meet again for almost two years.²³

Serenissimus raced to the front, where he divided the combined Ukraine and Ekaterinoslav armies - about 60,000 men - into his own main army and four corps. The strategy was to fight round the Black Sea in a south-westerly direction through the Principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia (today's Moldova and Rumania), taking the fortresses on each river: Dniester, Pruth, then Danube. Potemkin's army was to cover the Dniester until the Turks were diminished enough to begin fighting up the Danube into modern Bulgaria - to the walls of Constantinople.²⁴

The main Austrian army, under one of their many Scottish officers, Field- Marshal Loudon, was to attack Belgrade (in today's Serbia), while Prince Frederick Joseph of Saxe-Coburg-Saarlfeld co-operated with the Russians in Wallachia and Moldavia. The most important force, except Potemkin's own, was Suvorov's 'flying corps', the Third, which was to protect the 'hinge' with the Austrians on the Russian extreme left. Suvorov balanced himself across three parallel rivers - the Sereth, Berlad and Pruth - and waited.

The new Grand Vizier Hassan-Pasha Genase commanded an Ottoman army of 100,000: his strategy was to smash the Austrians where the link between the allies was weakest around the rivers Pruth and Sereth, close to Suvorov's 'hinge', while a new armada landed on the Crimea. Ex-Capitan- Pasha Ghazi Hassan, the white-bearded Crocodile of Sea Battles, took to the land in command of a 30,ooo-strong corps that was to distract Potemkin's main army while the Vizier broke through. The Turkish manoeuvres were unusually adept. The Russians were vigilant. On 11 May, Potemkin crossed the Bug, massed his forces at Olviopol and then advanced towards the powerful Ottoman fortress of Bender on the Dniester.

In the West, the world was changing. Potemkin was settling into his new headquarters at Olviopol when the Parisian mob stormed the Bastille on 3/14 July. The National Assembly passed the Declaration of the Rights of Man on 15/26 August.²⁵ The Polish Patriots, who were opposed to Russia, were encouraged by the French Revolution - Warsaw enjoyed a febrile fiesta of freedom and hope. Poland demanded that Russia withdraw its troops and magazines. Potemkin carefully monitored Poland, yet he had no choice but to comply.²⁶ He continued to pursue his own Polish policies, vigorously expanding his Black Sea Cossacks to act as an Orthodox spearhead which would raise the pro-Russian eastern area of the Commonwealth when the time came.²⁷

Potemkin 'flew' between his headquarters at Olviopol, where Russia, Poland and Turkey met, and Kherson, Ochakov and Elisabethgrad, checking and inspecting his vast front until he had exhausted himself with 'haem­orrhoids and fever', as he told Catherine, 'but nothing can stop me except death'.²⁸ She encouraged him by sending one of his rewards for Ochakov, the diamond-studded field-marshal's baton.

The Grand Vizier stealthily pushed forward, with a corps of 30,000, to strike at Coburg's Austrians before they could join up with the Russians. At this vital moment, a long and anguished secret letter arrived from a frantic empress. Just as the Turks probed the weakest point of Potemkin's front, Catherine's relationship with Mamonov disintegrated in the most humiliating way.

Catherine finally understood that Mamonov was not happy: it is hard to blame him. The favourite always complained that life at Court was like surviving in the jungle.²⁹ His role as a companion to an older woman bored him, now that he was accustomed to luxury. Potemkin blocked any political role for him - on his last visit, the Prince had vetoed Mamonov's request to be a Court vice-chancellor. His sexual duties may have become tedious, even distasteful.

Catherine was turning sixty. She remained publicly majestic, privately simple and playful. 'I saw her once or twice a week for ten years,' wrote Masson, 'every time with renewed admiration.' Her modesty with her staff was admirable: Countess Golovina recalled how she and her fellow maids- of-honour were happily eating dinner when they noted that the 'beautiful' hand of the servant who handed them their plates wore a 'superb solitaire ring'. They looked up to find it was the Empress herself. She took care with her appearance, keeping her good skin and fine hands. Her now white hair was carefully dressed - but she was exceedingly fat; her legs were often so swollen that they 'lost their shape'. Her architects, including Cameron at Tsarskoe Selo, and nobles whose houses she visited, gradually installed pentes douces to make it easier for her to enter buildings. Her voice was hoarse, her nose may have become more 'utterly Greek' or aquiline, she was cursed with wind and indigestion, and she had probably lost some of her teeth. She was older,[97] and time exaggerated both her affectionate nature and her emotional neediness.³⁰

The Empress wrote Mamonov a letter generously offering to release him and arrange his happiness by marrying him to one of the richest heiresses in Russia. His reply devastated her. He confessed he had been in love with Princess Daria Shcherbatova, a maid-of-honour, for a 'year and a half and asked to marry her. Catherine gasped and then collapsed at this shameless betrayal of her trust and feelings. Mamonov rushed after her, threw himself at her feet and revealed everything. Catherine's friend Anna Naryshkina shouted at the favourite. Deeply wounded but always decent to her lovers, Catherine agreed that he could marry Shcherbatova.

At first, she concealed this crisis from Potemkin, probably out of embar­rassment and to see if a relationship developed with a new young person close to her. But on 29 June she told her staff she was going to write to Potemkin at Olviopol. By the time it reached him, she had supervised Mamonov's marriage on 1 July: the groom received 2,250 peasants and 100,000 roubles. Catherine wept at the wedding. 'I've never been a tyrant to anybody,' she told Potemkin sadly, 'and I hate compulsion - is it possible you didn't know me to such an extent, and that the generosity of my character disappeared from your mind, and you considered me a wretched egotist? You would have healed me by telling me the truth.' She remembered Potemkin's warnings - 'Matushka, spit on him' - which she had ignored. 'But if you knew about his love, why didn't you tell me about it frankly?'³¹

Serenissimus replied: 'When I heard last year he was sending her fruits from the table, I understood it at once but I had no exact evidence to cite in front of you, Matushka. However, I hinted. I felt sorry for you, my foster- mother, and his rudeness and feigned illnesses were even more intolerable.' Potemkin despised Mamonov's 'blend of indifference and egotism ... Nar­cissus to an extreme degree', advising her to make the ingrate envoy to Switzerland.³² Instead Count and Countess Mamonov were sent to Moscow to stew in their own juices.

'A sacred place', Zavadovsky rightly said, 'is never empty for long.'³³ Catherine had already found Mamonov's replacement but she wanted to settle herself before telling Potemkin. Even in her first letter, Potemkin's eye must have been drawn to the reference to a young man she nicknamed 'le Noiraud' - 'Blackie' - with whom Catherine was getting acquainted. As early as three days after Mamonov's declaration, Catherine started to see more of Blackie: her valet and secretary both suspected an affair was developing.³⁴ He was a protege of Anna Naryshkina and Count Nikolai Saltykov, head of the Grand Duke Paul's household and a critic of Potemkin. As the entire court knew that Mamonov was in love with Shcherbatova, they lost no time in pushing Blackie towards the Empress, because they knew that Potemkin would intervene if they waited. The Prince could not choose Catherine's lovers but he liked to ensure they were not hostile. There is no doubt that Blackie's backers intended to undermine Potemkin, knowing that war prevented him from returning as he had after Lanskoy's death. In June 1789, this ailing Empress, tormented with war and dyspepsia, was far more likely to take what she was offered than at any other time in her life. Perhaps her happiness became more important than her dignity.

Blackie was Platon Alexandrovich Zubov, Catherine's last favourite. He was probably the handsomest of all. Aged twenty-two, Zubov was muscular yet frail, pretty and dark - hence Catherine's nickname for him - but his expres­sion was brittle, vain, cold. His frequent illnesses suited Catherine's maternal instincts. He had been at Court since the age of eleven - Catherine had paid for him to study abroad. This popinjay was clever in a shallow and silly way, but he was neither imaginative nor curious, nor able, merely greedy and ambitious. None of this mattered in a favourite. Potemkin helped her run the Empire and fight the war. Zubov was her companion and pupil in her work for the Empire. 'I'm doing quite well by the state,' she said disingenuously, 'by educating young men.'³⁵

Zubov's ascension to greatness followed a familiar rhythm: the Court noticed the youngster offer his arm to Catherine in the evening. He wore a new uniform with a large feather in the hat. After her card game, he was summoned to accompany Catherine to her apartments and took possession of the favourite's rooms, where he possibly found a cash present. The day after that, the antechamber of the 'new idol' was filled with petitioners.³⁶ On 3 July, Zubov was promoted to colonel in the Horse-Guards and adjutant- general, and significantly he gave a 2,000 rouble watch to his sponsor Nar- yshkina. Zubov's patrons already feared Potemkin's reaction and warned him to show respect to 'His Highness'.³⁷

Catherine fell in love.³⁸ She was almost swelling with admiration for Blackie. 'We love this child who is really very interesting,' she declared, protesting too much. Her joy had the mawkishness of an old woman in the throes of a sexual infatuation with a youth almost forty years younger, as she told Potemkin: 'I am fat and merry, come back to life like a fly in summer.'³⁹ Ordering some French books for Zubov, she even made a ponderous but unusually risque joke to her secretary. One of the books was called Lucine without commerce - a letter in which it is demonstrated that a woman can give birth without commerce with a man. Catherine laughed: 'That's a revelation, and in ancient times, Mars, Jupiter and the other gods provided the excuse.'⁴⁰ But she nervously waited for the Prince of Taurida's reaction.

'Your peace of mind is most necessary,' he wrote cautiously, 'and for me it's dearer than anything,' but he did not expect any political harm since 'your mercy is with me.'⁴¹ But Potemkin did not pass judgement on her choice of Zubov. Catherine could not quite bring herself to mention the youngster by name to Potemkin, but she could not resist raving about his prettiness: 'Blackie has very beautiful eyes.' She restated their secret partnership: 'You are right when you write that you have my mercy and there are no circumstances to harm you ... Your villains will have no success with me.' In return, she begged for Potemkin's approval of her new love: 'Comfort me, caress us.'⁴¹

Soon she was making Zubov write flattering letters to her consort, to recreate their 'family': 'Here I enclose for you an admiring letter from the most innocent soul ... who has a good heart and a sweet way of thinking.' She added hopefully: 'Think what a fatal situation it would be for my health without this man. Adieu топ ami, be nice to us.'⁴³ When he was 'nice', the Empress actually thanked him for his approval: 'It is a great satisfaction for me, my friend, that you are pleased with me and little Blackie ... I hope he doesn't become spoilt.'⁴⁴ That was too much to hope. Zubov spent hours in front of the mirror having his hair curled. He arrogantly let his pet monkey pull the wigs off venerable petitioners. 'Potemkin was indebted to his elevation almost solely to himself,' recalled Masson, who knew both men. 'Zubov owed his to the infirmities of Catherine.'⁴⁵

Zubov's rise is always described as a political disaster for Potemkin, but its significance has been exaggerated by hindsight. The Prince's first interest was for Catherine to find a favourite to leave him to run the Empire and to make her happy. He was not sorry to see the end of Mamonov, originally his choice, because he had become disrespectful to Catherine. When he was in Petersburg in February, it was rumoured he was pushing his own candidate⁴⁶ - and one source suggests it was Zubov's younger brother Valerian, which would mean that, whoever their friends were, the Zubovs were not regarded as inherently hostile. Indeed Potemkin liked the brave and able Valerian and promoted him wherever possible.⁴⁷ Damas, who was with Potemkin, did not notice any particular antipathy towards the Zubovs.⁴⁸ Potemkin and Zubov now began the usual correspondence - young favourite paying court to older consort. Every favourite dreamed of supplanting the Prince. The danger was now greater because of Catherine's age. But Potemkin's prestige and power increased throughout the war. So Zubov was politically inconvenient - but no more than a pinprick.

Serenissimus granted his approval slowly: 'My dear Matushka, how can I not sincerely love the man who makes you happy? You may be sure I will have a frank friendship with him because of his attachment to you.' But he had more exciting news: victory.⁴⁹

The Ottoman corps of 30,000 suddenly jabbed towards Fokshany in Moldavia, where 12,000 Austrians guarded Potemkin's right flank. Coburg, the stodgy Austrian commander, was in no doubt of his own limitations and called for Russian help. Potemkin had specifically ordered Suvorov to prevent any concentration of the Turks or attempt to divide the allied forces. As soon as Suvorov received Coburg's message, he informed Potemkin and force- marched his 5,000 Russians to intervene so aggressively that the Turkish commander presumed they must be the vanguard of an army. On 20/21 July 1789 at the Battle of Fokshany, Suvorov's tiny but disciplined corps, assisted by the Austrians, routed the Turks, killing over 1,500 while losing only a few hundred men. The Turks fled towards Bucharest.⁵⁰

The Grand Vizier's huge army was on the move again. Suvorov hurried back to his post. Potemkin crossed the Dniester on 12 August and turned southwards to set up his headquarters at Dubossary. All eyes were on the Grand Vizier: Potemkin kept his army between Dubossary and Kishnev, and rushed over to Ochakov and Kherson to prepare them for the planned Turkish attack from the sea.

At his Headquarters at Dubossary, Serenissimus lived sumptuously in a residence 'as splendid as the Vizier's'. William Gould, the emperor of land­scapes, created an instant English garden on the spot.⁵¹ Sard's orchestra played all day. Many generals have travelled with mistresses and servants, but only Potemkin went to war with an army of gardeners and violinists. It seemed as if he planned to spend the rest of his life there.⁵²

The Vizier correctly identified the 'hinge' between the allied armies as Potemkin's weakest point, so he launched two thrusts. The old Crocodile, Ghazi Hassan, sortied out of Ismail with a corps of 30,000, and lunged across the Pruth to draw Potemkin's main army. But Potemkin kept his army in place and despatched Repnin to parry the thrust and if possible take mighty Ismail: he pursued the now land-lubbing Algerian sailor and his corps all the

way back to the fortress. Once there, Repnin wasted time and did nothing.

On i September, Potemkin gave specific orders to Suvorov about the Vizier's army. 'If the enemy appears anywhere in your direction, attack him, having asked for God's mercy, and don't let him concentrate.'⁵³ Just after getting Potemkin's orders on 4 September, Suvorov received a second call for help from Coburg. The Grand Vizier was approaching Fokshany, bearing down on Coburg's 18,000 with an army of 90,000. Suvorov replied to Coburg: 'Coming. Suvorov'.⁵⁴ He just had time to send off a courier to the Prince before he embarked his 7,000 men on a Spartan forced-march of 100 versts, across flooded rivers, which he covered in two and a half days.

Potemkin fretted that he would not make it in time.⁵⁵ On the same day that he ordered Suvorov to be ready, he devised a complex amphibious operation to attack a vital Ottoman fortified port called Hadjibey, the future Odessa. The land forces advanced from Ochakov supported by a flotilla made up of Zaporogian chaiki and other oar-propelled gunboats, commanded by that talented Neapolitan adventurer Jose de Ribas, whose rear was covered by the ships-of-the-line of the Black Sea Fleet. Potemkin himself led his army forward towards Kaushany in case Repnin or Suvorov required his assistance. These sophisticated manoeuvres belie Potemkin's unjust reputation as a military incompetent.⁵⁶

Suvorov found Coburg cowed before the Grand Vizier's encampment on the River Rymnik. The Turks outnumbered the allies four to one. On 8 September, Potemkin ordered Suvorov to 'assist Prince Coburg in attacking the enemy but not in defence'. On 11 September, the allies attacked. The Turks fought with their old fanaticism, throwing wave after wave of Janissaries and Spahis against Suvorov's squares. They just held for two hours. Then the allied troops advanced, shouting 'Catherine' and 'Joseph'. Potemkin's new light forces - his Jaegers, mobile sharpshooters, and cavalry, Carabiniers and Cossacks - proved themselves as adept and swift as Ottoman forces. The Turks were annihilated, 15,000 died on the 'cruel battlefield'.⁵⁷ The Grand Vizier, as Potemkin boasted to his erstwhile friend Ligne, 'fled like a boy'.⁵⁸

The elated Serenissimus lavished praise on Suvorov: 'I embrace and kiss you sincerely, my dear friend, your indefatigable zeal makes me wish I could have you everywhere!' Suvorov embraced him back: 'I'm kissing your precious letter and remain in deepest respect, Serenissimus, Merciful Lord!' Their exultation was based on mutual respect: the strategy was Potemkin's; the tactics belonged to Suvorov's genius. Potemkin followed up Suvorov's triumph on land and sea. He took Kaushany on 13 September. Next day, Ribas captured Hadjibey. The Prince ordered the Sebastopol fleet out to sea to attack the Ottomans.

He then advanced on the two most potent Ottoman fortresses on the Dniester. Wielding the memory of the bloodbath of Ochakov as his weapon, Potemkin hoped to get them 'cheap'. First there were the towering ramparts of Akkerman (Belgrade-on-Dniester) that commanded the mouth of the river.

When the Turkish fleet headed back to Istanbul, Potemkin ordered the taking of Akkerman. It surrendered on 30 September. The Prince rushed down to inspect it and returned through Kishnev, struggling to arrange the provisioning of the armies as Poland closed its doors.*

Serenissimus turned to the greatest prize on the Dniester: the famous fortress of Bender, built high on an escarpment above the river in a modern fortified square with four formidable towers and a 20,ooo-strong garrison, a small army.⁵⁹ Potemkin moved to besiege the fortress, but he also opened negotiations. On 4 November, he got his wish. He later enjoyed telling Catherine the 'Miraculous Case' of Bender's eight generals, who dreamed that they had either to surrender or perish. They went to the Pasha and told him the story. The dreaming Turks were obviously looking for a somnolent excuse to avoid a Russian assault, but this life-saving parable amused Pot­emkin.⁶⁰ Bender surrendered; Potemkin took 300 cannons - in return for letting the garrison march out. The surrender document, now in Potemkin's papers,⁶¹ catches the elaborate formality of the stultified Ottoman bur­eaucracy, but it also referred to the Prince in terms not given to the Grand Vizier but only to the Sultan himself, t

Bender was Potemkin's ideal conquest, not costing Russia a single man. Success was infectious: Joseph congratulated Potemkin, but in an unpublished letter to Ligne he grasped Potemkin's true achievement: 'It's an art to besiege forts and take them by force ... but to make yourself master in this way is the greatest art of all.' It would be Potemkin's 'most beautiful glory'.⁶²

The Grand Vizier would not have agreed: after Rymnik, the Sultan had him killed in Shumla, while the Seraskier of Bender was beheaded in Istanbul: four months later, the British Ambassador noticed his head still rotting outside the Seraglio.⁶³

'Well Matushka, did it come off according to my plan?',⁶⁴ the euphoric Potemkin asked Catherine. Triumph made him playful, so he wrote her this ditty:

Nous avons pris neuf lan^ons Sans perdre un gar^on Et Bender avec trois Pashas Sans perdre un chat.⁶^

Serenissimus' reaction to Suvorov's victory at Rymnik could not have been

* Akkerman's massive fortress still stands.

f 'To his Highness Monseigneur Prince Potemkin: Representation of Ahmet Pasha Huhafiz of Bender. In rendering with deep respect the honours due to Your Highness, very generous, very firm, very gracious, ornamented of an elevated genius to devise and execute very great enterprises, whose authority is accom­panied by the most dazzling dignity, Principal Minister, acclaimed with the very highest precedence and first representative of Her Imperial Highness, the Padishah of Russia, we represent... the pity for children and women brings us to accept... the proposition.'

ф 'We've taken nine launches, Without losing a boy, And Bender with three Pashas, Without losing a cat.' more generous: 'Really Matushka, he deserves your favour and the fighting was vital, I am thinking what to give him... Peter the Great granted Counts for nothing. How about giving him [a title] with the surname of "Rymniksky"?'⁶⁶ Potemkin was proud that Russians had rescued Austrians, who had been on the verge of running away. He asked her to 'show grace to Suvorov' and 'shame the sponger-generals who aren't worth their salaries'.⁶⁷

Catherine got the message. She gave Suvorov the title and a diamond- studded sword engraved 'Conqueror of the Grand Vizier'. Potemkin thanked her for Suvorov's reward (Joseph made him an imperial count too) and gave every soldier a rouble.⁶⁸ When he sent all Suvorov's rewards - a 'whole wagon'⁶⁹ of diamonds and the Cross of St George ist degree - he told the new Count, 'You would of course obtain equal glory and victories at any time; but not every chief would inform you about the rewards with pleasure as great as mine.' Once again, these two brilliant and overly emotional eccentrics outdid each other. 'I can hardly see the daylight for tears of joy!', declared Suvorov-Rymniksky. 'Long live Prince Grigory Alexandrovich ... He is an honest man, a kind man, a great man!'⁷⁰

Potemkin was the hero of the hour, going from 'conquest to conquest', as Catherine told Ligne: he had now taken the entire Dniester and Bug and the land between them.⁷¹ 'Те Deums' were sung in Petersburg; 101 cannons were fired. If power is an aphrodisiac, victory is love itself: Catherine wrote to him as if they were almost lovers again. 'Your present campaign is brilliant! I love you very, very much.'⁷² But they were still discussing how to react to Prussian pressure to undermine Russian gains against the Turks. She told him she was taking his advice about the Prussians: 'We are caressing the Prussians,' though it was not easy to tolerate their 'abuse'. She told him that Zubov had wanted to see Potemkin's art collection and apartments in the house on Millionaya, so Catherine took him on a tour and noticed that the decor was a bit shabby for a conquering hero. She had it redecorated, lavishing white damask on the bedroom and hanging his collection for him. She signed off: 'I love you with all my heart.'⁷³

Meanwhile the Austrians, now in the sure hands of Loudon, had taken the Balkan Belgrade on 19 September, while Bucharest fell to Coburg. The 'Те Deums' for the two Belgrades (the other was Akkerman - Belgrade-on- Dniester) were sung in Petersburg simultaneously.

Victory accelerated a cult of the Prince as Mars. Catherine had cast a medallion of his profile to commemorate Ochakov. The sculptor, Shubin, was carving a bust.⁷⁴ So she lectured Potemkin on stardom like the sensible mother of a famous son. 'Don't be too bumptious,' she wrote, 'but show the world the greatness of your soul.'⁷⁵ Potemkin understood that 'everything good is given to me by God', but he was a little hurt. He threatened to retire to a bishopric.⁷⁶ Catherine replied: 'A monastery will never be the home of a man whose name is trumpeted across Asia and Europe - it's too small for him.'⁷⁷

In Vienna, where even Joseph was now popular, the Prince's name was cheered in the theatres and the women wore belts and rings emblazoned 'Potemkin'. He could not resist telling Catherine all about it and sent her Princess Esterhazy's 'Potemkin' ring. After her lecture, he was careful not to boast too much to the Empress, who was so like him in her love of glory: 'Since I am yours, then my successes too belong directly to you.'⁷⁸

The ailing Kaiser urged Potemkin to make a peace rendered more desirable by 'the bad intentions of our joint enemies' - the Prussians.⁷⁹ Surely now the Turks would be ready. Potemkin set up Court in Jassy, the Moldavian capital, to winter like a sultan, revel in his mistresses, build his towns, create his regiments - and negotiate peace with the Sublime Porte. Now he was emperor of all he surveyed. He lived in Turkish palaces; his Court was ever more exotic - Kabardian princes and Persian ambassadors; his girls, whether Russian or not, behaved like odalisques. The heat, the distances, the years away from Petersburg, changed the man. His enemies began to compare him to the semi-mythical seventh-century в с Assyrian tyrant, famed for his capricious extravagance, voluptuous decadence and martial victories - Sardanapalus.

THE DELICIOUS AND THE CRUEL: SARDANAPALUS

Now dreaming I a Sultan am I terrify the world by glances;

Gavrila Derzhavin, 'Ode to Princess Felitsa'

The despotism of vice

The weakness and the wickedness of luxury The negligence - the apathy - the evils Of sensual sloth produce ten thousand tyrants.

Lord Byron, Sardanapalus

'Be very careful with the Prince,' whispered Princess Ekaterina Dolgorukaya to her friend Countess Varvara Golovina when she arrived at the court of Serenissimus in Jassy, the capital of Moldavia. 'He is like a Sovereign here.'¹ Potemkin's chosen capital, Jassy (now Ia§i in Rumania), could have been made for him. It was surrounded by three empires - Ottoman, Russian and Habsburg - prayed in three religions - Moslem, Orthodox and Jewish - and spoke three languages - Greek, Turkish and French. Its marketplaces, dominated by Jews, Greeks and Italians, offered 'all the merchandise of the Orient in abundance'.² Its sophistication, which consoled Ligne in 1788 for the miseries of Ochakov, had 'enough of the oriental to have the piquant of Asia and enough civilization to add to it some European graces'.³

The rulers, the Hospodars or Princes, of Wallachia and Moldavia, the two Danubian Principalities, were Greeks from the Phanar District of Con­stantinople and some of them were descended from Byzantine emperors. These wealthy Phanariots bought their temporary thrones from the Ottoman Sultan. Their Orthodox-Islamic, Byzantine-Ottoman coronations in Istanbul were perhaps the only example of rulers crowned in a country which they did not rule.⁴ Once in Jassy or Bucharest, the hydrid Greek-Turkish Hospodars taxed their temporary realms to fill their coffers to cover the exorbitant price they had paid the Sultan for their thrones: 'a prince leaves Constantinople with three million piastres of debt and after four years ... returns with six million'.⁵ They lived like magnificent parodies of Ottoman-Byzantine emperors, surrounded by Phanariot courtiers - their prime minister was called the Grand Postelnik, their police chief the Grand Spatar and their chief justice the Grand Hetman. Often they might rule in both places, or the same one, several times.

The aristocracy, the boyars, were Rumanians but were overlaid with rich Phanariot dynasties, some of whom were now based in Jassy, where they built their fine neo-Classical palaces. These Greek boyars, who looked like 'monkeys on a horse covered in rubies', lived in Turkish robes and pantaloons, grew their beards, shaved their heads and sported bonnets encircled with fur and rings of pearls. They waved flywhisks, nibbled sherbet and read Voltaire. Their women languished on divans, wearing diamond-infested turbans and short transparent petticoats, their necks and arms covered in gauze with pearls and coins sewn into them. They dangled fan-like chaplets made of diamonds, pearls, coral, lapis lazuli and rare wood. Connoisseurs of femi­ninity like Ligne were fascinated by these 'pretty, tender - and apathetic' princesses whose only flaw was the protuberant belly regarded as a sign of beauty. Ligne claimed that their morals made the Paris of Les Liaisons Dangereuses appear monastic and that the Hospodar let his friends 'visit' the women in his wife's household - but only after a medical check. 'People took each other and left each other, there was neither jealousy nor bad temper.'⁶

It was not merely the cosmopolitanism and luxury that suited Potemkin, but also the politics. The throne of Moldavia was highly lucrative but extremely dangerous: heads were lost as quickly as fortunes were gained. Ligne over­heard the ladies at court sighing, 'here my father was massacred by order of the Porte and here my sister by order of the Hospodar'. This was the battleground of both the Russo-Turkish wars, which placed the Hospodars in an impossible position. They trod a political tightrope between Orthodox God and Moslem Sultan. They had to play a complicated double game. The First Russo-Turkish War had won Russia rights to appoint consuls in these Principalities. One of the major causes of the outbreak of war in 1787 was the Ottoman overthrow of the Moldavian Hospodar, Alexander Mav- rocordato, who was given sanctuary in Russia and sent Potemkin books and requests for money, while writing that 'philosophy alone sustains me'. The impermanence of these Hospodars, their Greek race and the Orthodoxy of the people attracted Potemkin.⁷

Serenissimus now ruled from Jassy as if he had, at last, found his kingdom. Dacia had been destined for him since the Greek Project of 1782. The rumours of Potemkin's potential crowns became ever more colourful - a Livonian duchy, a Greek kingdom of Morea and even a most Potemkinian project to buy two Italian islands, Lampedusa and Linosa, from the Kingdom of Naples and found an order of knighthood - but a variation on Dacia was much more likely.⁸ Potemkin 'regarded Moldavia as a domain which belonged to him'.⁹ While the Hospodars of Moldavia and Wallachia corresponded with Pot­emkin from the Turkish camp, begging for peace,¹⁰ the Prince himself adopted their resplendence, while ruling through a Divan of boyars, under his dynamic Georgian negotiator¹¹ Sergei Lazhkarev.[98] The Turks and Westerners knew that Potemkin wanted Moldavia; he coaxed and charmed the boyars, who¹² themselves were almost offering him the throne.¹³ Their letters at this time thanked him for delivering them 'from the tyranny of the Turks. We beg Your Highness not to lose from your vigilant vision the little interests of our country which will always have Your Highness as Liberator.' Prince Cantacuzino, scion of Byzantine emperors, heralded this 'epoch of felicity - we dare to run to the wise lights of Your Highness, hero of the century'.¹⁴

Serenissimus now took the modern step of becoming a press baron. He created, edited and published his own newspaper called Le Courrier de Moldavie. Printed by his own movable printing press, Le Courrier was a tabloid emblazoned with the Moldavian crest that reported international and local news. The articles were moderately liberal, rabidly against the French Revolution and gently supportive of an independent Rumanian realm under Potemkin.¹⁵ Some believed he even planned to create a Moldavian army by detaching crack Russian regiments.¹⁶ His nephew General Samoilov, who was often with him at this time, states that he would only ever make peace if Moldavia - Daciaf - was granted independence.¹⁷

The Prince was never one to allow war, winter or the small matter of a new kingdom to interfere with his pleasures. 'Mister monk, no monkhood,' Catherine teased him in an imperial understatement.¹⁸ He resided in the palaces of either Princes Cantacuzino or Ghika and spent hot days in Czerdak in the countryside nearby.'t He was joined by ten mechanics from Tula, twelve carriages of books, twenty jewellers, twenty-three female carpet-makers, 100 embroiderers,¹⁹ a mime troupe, his 200 hornplayers (to play Sard's 'Те Deum' to Ochakov, accompanied by the firing of cannons, an idea borrowed by Tchaikovsky for his 1812 Overture), a 3oo-voice choir, a corps de ballet,¹⁰ gardener Gould, architect Starov,²¹ nephews, nieces and his chancellor Popov.

Only his English cooks refused to go,²² so he had to make do with English gardens and French meals - probably a much better idea anyway. But he did receive hampers²³ of English delicacies as a consolation. One such con­signment - the bill is in his archives - contained smoked salmon, dried salmon, marinated salmon, Dutch herrings, Livonian anchovies, smoked souls, 1am- preys, eels, two barrels of apples, two bottles of mussels, two bottles of tinto, two bottles of Lacrima Christi, two bottles of champagne and six of Hermiatate, three bottles of red burgundy, three of white burgundy, three bottles of Jamaican rum - and more.

'Parties, balls, theatres, ballets were organized ceaselessly.' When the Prince heard that an officer 700 versts away played the violin well, he sent a courier for the fiddler; when he arrived, he listened with pleasure, gave him a gift and sent him straight back again.²⁴ This reflected Potemkin's pre-Napoleonic view that an army marches on its merriment, not its stomach. 'A sad army can never undertake the toughest assignments,' he wrote, 'and it's more likely to suffer illness.'²⁵

The belles of Petersburg trooped down to entertain him and deceive their husbands. Praskovia Potemkina of the flawless skin and perfect face was now firmly esconced as 'favourite sultana',²⁶ and supplicants waited in her antechambers to ask for favours.²⁷ Praskovia and the Prince enjoyed a deep love affair in Jassy. 'You are my pleasure and my priceless treasure, you are God's gift to me,' he wrote, adding that his love expressed itself to her, not in mad passion or drunkenness, but in 'never ending tenderness'. Without her, 'I'm only half of myself ... you are the soul of my soul, my Parashinka.' He always enjoyed choosing dresses for his nieces and designing habits for monks, and Praskovia must have looked fetching in uniforms because he wrote to her: 'Do you know, beautiful sweetheart, you are a Cuirassier in my regiment. The helmet suits you perfectly, everything fits you. Today I shall put a bishop's hat on you ... Do me a favour, my unrivalled beauty, make up a dress of calico and purple satin ...'. He told her which jewels to wear - which to string, which to mount in a diadem. He even designed their imaginary house of love, which reveals the touching originality of this strange, sensitive man: 'I drew you patterns, I brought you diamonds, now I am drawing you a small house and garden in the oriental taste with all the magical luxuries ...'. There would be a big hall, the sound of a fountain. Upstairs, there would be a lighted gallery with 'pictures of Hero and Leander, Apollo and Daphne ... the most ardent poems of Sappho' and an erotic painting of Praskovia herself 'in a white short dress, girded by a delicate lilac belt, open at the breast, hair loose and unpowdered, the chemise held by a ruby ...'. The bed would be surrounded by 'curtains as thin as smoke' in a room with aquamarine glass. 'But the place where luxury will exhaust itself is the bath', which would be surrounded by mirrors and filled with water, scented with rose, lilac, jasmine, and orange'. Serenissimus was 'cheerful when you're cheerful, I'm full up when you're full up'.²⁸

When the Prince was in love, he would do anything for his mistress. In March and April 1790, he even ordered Faleev to rename two of his ships after Praskovia.²⁹ 'The jewels, diamonds and all the treasures of the four parts of the world were used to decorate her charms.' When she wanted jewels, 434 ^the apogee

Colonel Bauer galloped off to Paris; when she talked about perfumes, Major Lamsdorf headed for Florence and returned with two fragrant carriages of it.³°

Here is his Parisian shopping-list for one of those legendary missions, probably for Praskovia and other 'sultanas', in July 1790, second year of the French Revolution. The courier was Lamsdorf. When he arrived in Paris, the Russian envoy Baron Simolin was expected to drop everything. 'I have not ceased to occupy myself with him in the execution of the commissions Your Highness has wished to be discharged in Paris and to assist him with my advice and that of a lady of my acquaintance.' It sounds as if Simolin recruited his mistress to make sure he was buying the right stockings. Indeed, 'we have taken care to execute all things in the latest fashion'. Without the lady and Lamsdorf, Simolin admitted he could not have bought the following:

- fashion pieces [ballgowns] made by Mademoiselles Gosfit, Madame de Modes

14,333 l^ivres

- fashion pieces [ballgowns] made by Henry Desreyeux 9,488 livres

- a piece of muslin from the Indies, embroidery from India in silk and silver (Henry

Desreyeux) 2400 livres

[fashion from] Madame Plumesfeur

724 lives - seller of Rubies 1224 livres - madame the florist 826 livres -couturier for 4 corsets 255 livres

-shoemakers for 72 pairs of shoes [ball slippers] 446 livres

-embroiderer for 12 pairs of shoes [ball slippers] 288 livres -a pair of ear muffs 132 livres

the stocking maker for 6 dozen pairs

648 livres -rubies 248 livres - madame the gauze seller 858 livres - the wrapping-up man Bocqueux 1200 livres.³¹

One suspects that not all of these were for the Prince himself. As soon as all the craftsmen and seamstresses had finished their work, Lamsdorf galloped them back to Jassy. These frivolous missions were also useful: the couriers who brought delicacies and ballgowns from Paris bore Potemkin's vast cor­respondence - twenty to thirty letters a day - and collected intelligence and replies; for example, Stackelberg in Warsaw reported that Potemkin's fastest courier had delivered an urgent despatch on his way to the West.³² This was a diplomatic, espionage, ballgown and catering service, all in one.

Serenissimus was certainly extravagant. That trip cost 44,000 livres for fourteen items, approximately £2,000, at a time when an English gentleman could live comfortably on £300 a year. It was more than the annual salary of a Russian field-marshal (7,000 roubles).³³ These missions were quite frequent. Potemkin even sent Grimm regular shopping-lists of female clothing, maps or musical instruments which Catherine's philosophe dutifully provided.³⁴ However, Potemkin's notorious inefficiency in paying debts drove Simolin to distraction. On 25 December 1788, he was even forced to appeal to Bezbor­odko for help in getting the Prince to pay for an earlier expedition that had cost another 32,000 livres.³⁵

Potemkin's lifestyle had been royal if not imperial since 1774, and he possessed 'a fortune greater than certain kings'.³⁶ It is impossible to work out the exact sums: even on his death, his estate was unquantifiable. The Prince was 'prodigiously rich and not worth a farthing', wrote Ligne, 'preferring prodigality and giving, to regularity in paying'.³⁷ This was almost literally true, because he was essentially a member of the imperial household - so that, the Treasury was his private bank. 'It is true Potemkin had immediate access to the State Treasury,' claimed Masson, 'but he also spent a great deal for the State and showed himself as much a Grand Prince of Russia as a favourite of Catherine.'³⁸ Pushkin later recorded the story that, when a Treasury clerk queried Potemkin's latest request for money, he sent back a note that read: 'Pay up or fuck off!' It was said that Catherine ordered the Treasury to regard his requests like her own, but this was not quite so.³⁹

There is no record of Catherine ever turning down any of Potemkin's requests for money, but he still had to apply for the money, even though he knew it would be granted. During the building of his towns and fleets and during the war, massive amounts of money poured through his hands, but the image of his wanton waste of public funds is not borne out by the archives, which show how the money was assigned by Catherine, via Procurator- General Viazemsky, and then distributed by Potemkin, via his offices and officials like Faleev, Zeitlin or Popov, down to the actual regiments and fleets. Much of it never actually reached the Prince himself - though he was too grand to concern himself with smaller sums and Viazemsky complained to the Empress that he had neglected to account for all of it. This touches on the question of his financial probity. In his case, it was a meaningless concept:

Serenissimus used his own money for the state and the Treasury for his personal uses and saw little difference between the two.⁴⁰

The Prince was hungry for money and he loved spending it - but it did not interest him for its own sake. He had to spend a fortune to maintain himself in the style of imperial consort when even senior courtiers strained themselves to keep up appearances. Furthermore, the delays in payments by the Treasury meant that, in order to push through his projects and raise his armies, he had to spend his own money. His avidity for riches was part of his insurance policy against the accession of Paul, one reason he invested in Polish land.

Once he was showing some officers round one of his palaces when they came upon a gold bath. The officers raved about it so much that Potemkin shouted: 'If you can shit enough to fill it up, you can keep it.' When a flatterer marvelled at the resplendence of some ball he gave, the Prince snapped: 'What, sir, do you presume to know the depth of my purse?' Potemkin himself never had any idea of its depth. He just knew there was almost no bottom: his fortune was variously estimated at nine, sixteen, forty and fifty million roubles. But given that during war and peace the whole military and southern development budgets of the Empire passed through his Chancellery, these figures are irrelevant and his debts enormous.⁴¹

Potemkin borrowed prodigiously and he tormented his Scottish banker, Richard Sutherland, who became rich on Potemkin's business and eventually rose to be Catherine's Court banker and a baron.[99] Bankers and merchants circled Potemkin like vultures, competing to offer goods and loans.⁴² Suth­erland worked hardest, and suffered most, to win Potemkin's business. On 13 September 1783, he begged Potemkin 'humbly to condescend to give orders to make payment to me of the rising claims which I have the honour to send him coming to 167,029 roubles and sixty kopecks', mostly spent on state business, settling immigrants. The anguished banker tried to explain, 'again I take the liberty of representing to Your Highness that my credit depends, and depends a lot, on the return of this money'.⁴³ Sutherland was evidently desperate, because he owed other bankers in Warsaw and beyond, and it often seems as if Potemkin was about to set off a chain-reaction banking crash across Europe - but it is worth noting that most of this money was not spent on baubles. Sutherland was the means by which Potemkin financed the settlement of immigrants, the procurement of timber and the building of his towns, the best example of how his personal and imperial spending were entangled.

By 1788, the Prince owed Sutherland 500,000 roubles. Three weeks later, Sutherland swore that things had reached such a 'critical and worrying point' as to force him to 'come importuning to my first benefactor ... to obtain ... the sum without which I would not know how to honour my affairs'. It was

Potemkin himself who scrawled in French on the letter: Tell him he'll receive 200,000 roubles.'

Serenissimus was far from miserly - on the contrary, he was wildly generous. Saving was foreign to his nature. Only his death gave a snapshot of his fortune and even then it hardly enlightens us. Like the Empress herself, he was part of the state, and the Empire was his fortune.⁴⁴

A country's enemies multiply in proportion to its successes. Russia's enemies, aroused by Potemkin's dangerous victories, did all they could to encourage the Ottomans to keep fighting. Meanwhile Russia's military activity became paralysed by the prospect of war against Prussia, Poland and England as well as Turkey and Sweden. So Potemkin spent the winter of 1789 and much of the following year trying to negotiate with the Sublime Porte. Initially, the Turks seemed sincere in their wish to make peace. Sultan Selim freed the Russian Ambassador from the Seven Towers and appointed 'the famous Algerian knight,'⁴⁵ ex-Capitan-Pasha Ghazi Hassan-Pasha, as grand vizier, to talk peace.

However, Prussian diplomacy aimed to undermine Russia and fulfil the so-called Hertzberg Plan, named after the Prussian Chancellor, which was designed to secure the Polish towns of Thorn and Danzig for Prussia in return for Austria ceding Galicia to Poland and Russia returning the Danubian Principalities to Turkey. This required a coalition against Russia, so the Sultan was offered an alliance to secure the return of the Crimea. Sweden was offered Livonia with Riga. Russia's ally Austria was threatened with Prussian invasion. Russia itself was forced to withdraw from Poland, leaving the field to Prussia, which found itself in the ironic situation of having the greatest influence in a country it wanted to carve up. It was only now, when Poland was offered constitutional reform and an alliance in return for the cession of Thorn and Danzig, that the Poles realized that they had been deceived: Prussia was not just as carnivorous as Russia but more so. Yet they were forced to accept the Prussian advances and turned on the Russians. England backed Prussia in demanding that Russia and Austria make peace with the Porte on the basis of the status quo ante bellum. There was no question of any Russian military operations: Potemkin had to move a corps to cover a possible attack by Poland and Prussia. By 24 December 1789, Catherine was telling her secretary: 'Now we are in a crisis: either peace or a triple war with Prussia.'⁴⁶

Potemkin's agent for the peace negotiations was a truly Levantine operator and diplomatic entrepreneur named Ivan Stepanovich Barozzi, a Greek quad­ruple agent for Russia, Turkey, Austria and Prussia simultaneously. After meanderingly mysterious Potemkinian conversations in Jassy, where he was shocked by the Prince's lecherous behaviour, Barozzi headed for the Vizier's headquarters, Shumla with Potemkin's terms.⁴⁷ The Dniester would be the 438 the apogee

new border. Akkerman and Bender would be razed. The Principalities would be 'independent'.[100]

Barozzi reached Shumla on 26 December 1789. The Prince's accounts show the way such discussions were lubricated with a shower of baksheesh. At least sixteen rings, gold clocks, chains, snuff-boxes, were designated for different Turkish officials, specified as 'Ring with blue ruby and diamond for first secretary of Turkish ambassador Ovni Esfiru', while Barozzi himself got a 'ring with a big emerald' either to present or to wear for his discussions with the Vizier.⁴⁸ Potemkin even offered to build a mosque in Moscow. However charming the brilliants, Potemkin's terms did not please the 'Algerine renegado'. Serenissimus, unimpressed with the counter-proposals, gave his new terms on 27 February 1790. 'My propositions are short,' he said, 'there is no need for a great deal of talk.' There would be no armistice - 'more the wish to gain time than make peace - from what I know of Turkish artifice'. Then came a Potemkinian phrase: 'The Turks like to take a chariot to chase a hare.' The Prince preferred to be defeated rather than tricked.⁴⁹

Potemkin was right not to commit himself completely to the Barozzi talks. The Prince knew from the Austrians and his Istanbul spies that Sultan Selim regarded the Grand Vizier's peace talks as a secondary, parallel policy to his negotiations with the Prussian envoy, Dietz, in Constantinople. If the Turks could get help from Prussia and Poland, they could go on fighting. By the time Potemkin replied, the Sultan had already signed an aggressive alliance with Prussia on 20 January 1790 which committed Frederick William to help reconquer the Crimea and go to war against Catherine.

As this noose tightened around Russia, 'the health of the Emperor is the severest of all the storms which menace the political sky', Potemkin told Kaunitz that January. Joseph II was stricken, physically with tuberculosis, and politically with revolts across his Empire from Hungary to the Neth­erlands. He seemed to be recovering when he had to undergo an agonizing operation on an anal abcess that sapped his strength. The death scene was tragic. 'Has anyone wept over me?', he asked. He was told that Ligne was in tears. 'I did not think I was deserving of such affection,' replied the Emperor. He suggested his own epitaph: 'Here lies a prince whose intentions were pure but who had the misfortune to see all his plans collapse.' Catherine was 'sorry for my ally', who was 'dying, hated by everybody.'⁵⁰ When Joseph died on 9/20 February 1790, Kaunitz supposedly muttered: 'That was very good of him.'⁵¹

It may have been good for the Habsburg Monarchy but it was another blow to Russia. On 18/29 March, Prussia tightened its ring once again and signed a military alliance with Poland. Frederick William moved 40,000 men towards Livonia in the north and another 40,000 in Silesia, mustering a 100,ooo-man reserve. The new Habsburg monarch, Leopold, King of Hungary (until he was elected emperor), was alarmed and immediately wrote to Potemkin: 'You have lost a friend in my brother His Majesty the Emperor, you have found another in me who honours more than anyone your genius and nobility.' Serenissimus and Leopold co-ordinated their defence of Galicia against the Poles - but the King of Hungary's true concern was to prevent the Prussian invasion 'in concert with Poland' and save the Habsburg Monarchy. He begged Potemkin to make a peace that had already slipped away.⁵²

In the midst of these upheavals, the Prince learned that an admirable Englishman was dying of a fever near Kherson. John Howard was a selfless prison-reformer, who had dared to expose the misery of jails and hospitals on his travels across the world, not least in Potemkin's Viceroyalty. Ser­enissimus sent his doctor to tend him, but Howard died. The Duke of Leeds, the British Foreign Secretary, wrote to say that 'the British nation will never forget' such sensibilite and Potemkin replied, 'Mr Howard had every right to my attentions. He was the famous friend of Humanity and a British citizen and these, Monsieur le Due, are claims enough to acquire my esteem.' Howard became a Russian, and Soviet, hero.⁵³

The Prince of Taurida now turned his guns and imagination on to Russia's once and future enemy, Poland. The so-called 'Patriots', elated at the prospect of gaining a strong constitution, expelling the Russians and receiving Galicia from Austria, controlled Warsaw. The strain of losing Poland took its toll on Catherine and Potemkin - he suffered hangnail and rheumatism. Catherine sweetly sent him a 'whole pharmacy of medicines' and 'a fox fur coat with a sable hat'.⁵⁴ If it came to war against Prussia and Poland, 'I will take command in person,' Potemkin told Leopold.⁵⁵ While the Austrians panicked and asked for Russian assistance, military operations against the Turks were suspended.

Catherine regarded Poland as an enemy to be dealt with when she had the chance, but Potemkin's protean imagination had for some time been evolving a plan to insert a Trojan Horse into the Commonwealth. The Trojan Horse was himself, backed by his Orthodox co-religionists in eastern Poland and by his new Cossack Host. He would raise Orthodox Poland in the Palatinates of Bratslav, Kiev and Podolia (where his huge estates lay) against the Catholic centre, on behalf of Russia, in the Cossack tradition of Hetman Bogdan Khmelnitsky. So, after taking Bender, he asked Catherine to grant him a new title with special historic resonance: grand hetman.⁵⁶

'Your plan is very good,' replied the Empress, though she wondered if the Hetmanate would provoke more hatred in the Polish Sejm.⁵⁷ Nonetheless in January, she appointed him 'Grand Hetman of the Black Sea and Eka­terinoslav Cossack Hosts'. Potemkin was delighted with his Hetmanate and designed a resplendent new uniform in which he posed round Jassy.⁵⁸ His own extravagance grated on his sometimes coenobitic nature: he had the sensitivity to notice that his poorer officers could not keep up, so he ordered everyone, including himself, to wear plain cloth tunics - much more Spartan, he told Catherine.⁵⁹ He had become careful to share his glory with the Empress. When she hailed him as 'my Hetman', he replied: 'Of course I'm yours! I can boast that I owe nothing to anyone except you.'⁶⁰

Potemkin, who already effectively controlled Russian foreign policy towards Austria and Turkey, was taking over Polish policy too. He demanded the sacking of the Russian Ambassador in Warsaw, Stackelberg, whom he called a scared 'rabbit',⁶¹ so Catherine appointed Potemkin's ally Bulgakov.⁶² She knew that Potemkin had his own interests in Poland and remained sensitive to the possibility of his forming an independent duchy out of his lands. He reassured her that 'there's nothing I wish for myself here' and, as for the hetman title, 'if your welfare did not demand it', he did not need a 'phantom that was more comic than distinguished'. Meanwhile he spent the spring building up his own Cossack Host - even persuading some of his Zaporogian bachelors to marry.⁶³

Potemkin's Hetmanate did outrage the Patriots in Warsaw. Rumours of his plans to become king of Poland reached a new intensity. The Prince indig­nantly denied this ambition to Bezborodko: 'It's forgivable for the King [of Poland] to think I want his place. For me, let the devil be there. What a sin it is to think that I may have other interests than those of the state.'⁶⁴ Potemkin was probably telling the truth: the crown of Poland was a fool's cap. A Ukrainian or Moldavian duchy loosely attached to Poland was more feasible. Besides, he had long since convinced himself of that statesman's vanity - that what was good for Potemkin was good for Russia.

The French and Polish Revolutions changed the atmosphere at Catherine's Court as well as her foreign policy. She was alarmed by the spread of French ideas - or 'poison' as she called them - and was determined to suppress them in Russia. In May 1790, when Russia was losing its Austrian ally, the Swedish War was critical, and the Prusso-Polish alliance threatened to open a new front, a young nobleman named Alexander Radishchev published an anonym­ous book, A Journey from St Petersburg to Moscow, which was veiled attack on Catherine, serfdom and Potemkin, whom he implied was an Oriental tyrant. However, it was the application of French Revolutionary principles to Russia, not merely the insults about Potemkin, that outraged her. Radishchev was arrested, tried for sedition and lese-majeste - and sentenced to death.

The Prince intervened on the author's behalf, even though the Revolutions had made this a dangerous time to undermine the regime, even though he was personally attacked, and despite the pressure on him. 'I've read the book sent to me. I am not angry ... It seems, Matushka, he's been slandering you too. And you also won't be angry. Your deeds are your shield.' Potemkin's generous response and sense of proportion calmed Catherine. She commuted the sentence and Radishchev was exiled to Siberia. 'The monarch's mercy', wrote the writer's grateful brother on 17 May 1791, 'was obtained by Prince Grigory Alexandrovich.'⁶*

The Prince was still negotiating with the Grand Vizier. Catherine decided that the demand for an independent Moldavia with its own prince (Potemkin) was excessive, given the Porte's new treaty with Prussia. The ever flexible Prince seamlessly switched policies and proposed instead that Moldavia be given to Poland as a morsel to tempt the Commonwealth back to the Russian fold. He lost nothing because it could still become his private Polish duchy.⁶⁶ Serenissimus was suffering. 'Anxiety of such uncertainty weakens me: deprived of sleep and food,' he told her, 'I'm worse than a baby in arms.' He did not forget Zubov either: Potemkin loved Catherine's young lover 'more and more, for he pleases you'.⁶⁷

Once Sultan Selim was committed to fight on, backed by Prussia, the Grand Vizier's peace policy became obsolete. The ex-Capitan-Pasha was too prestigious to kill openly, so the Crocodile of Sea Battles perished mysteriously on 18 March 1790, probably of the Sultan's poison. This alarmed Catherine. 'For God's sake,' she warned Potemkin. 'Be on guard against the Turk ... He may poison you. They use such tricks ... and it's possible the Prussians will give them the opportunity' to exterminate the man 'whom they fear most'.⁶⁸ Meanwhile, the Turks in Moldavia took the opportunity to defeat Coburg's Austrian army, which provoked a Potemkinian outburst to Catherine that the Austrian Field-Marshal had 'gone like a fool and been thrashed like a whore'. But the inconsistent King of Prussia was shocked when he learned that his new treaty with the Porte committed him to fight Russia and disowned the alliance, recalling his envoy Dietz in disgrace. Frederick William was more interested in fighting the Austrians. In May, he assumed personal command of his army.⁶⁹

The Habsburgs succumbed to the Prussian threat. Leopold abandoned Joseph's hopes of winning Turkish territory in order to restore order to his own provinces and negotiated a rapprochement with Prussia, therefore withdrawing from the Turkish War. On 16/27 July at Reichenbach, Leopold agreed to the Anglo-Prussian demands of instant armistice on the basis of the status quo ante bellum. Prussia celebrated this victory by raising the stakes: Frederick William ratified Dietz's Prusso-Turkish treaty after all. Russia stood alone in the cold war against Prussia, England and Poland, and in the hot one against Turkey and Sweden.

On 28 June, the Swedes for the first time defeated the Russian Baltic Fleet, now commanded by Nassau, whose recklessness caught up with him at Svensksund.⁷⁰ But Catherine, who hated admitting bad news, delayed telling Potemkin for three weeks.⁷¹ However, this cloud had a silver lining - the Swedish victory saved Gustavus' reputation, therefore allowing him to seek an honourable peace, signed on 3/14 August at Verela, based on the status quo ante bellum. 'We've pulled one paw out of the mud,' exulted Catherine to Potemkin. 'When we pull the other one out, then we'll sing Hallelujah!'⁷²

The withdrawal of Austria from the war had temporarily alleviated the threat from Prussia too. Potemkin and Catherine realized that, while Prussia and England cooked up their next move, there was a chance to break the Turks, who had strengthened their forces on the Danube and in the Caucasus. The Prince was as 'tired as a dog', travelling back and forth the 1,000 versts between Kherson, Ochakov and his new naval base, Nikolaev, to inspect his ships. Nonetheless, he created an amphibious strategy to reduce the Turkish fortresses on the Danube which would open the road to Constantinople.⁷³ The fleet was to patrol the Black Sea. The army was to take the Danubian fortresses. The flotilla - a most Potemkinian improvisation of converted imperial barges, Benthamite gunboats, Zaporogian chaiki and a Marseilles merchantman disguised as a warship, commanded by Ribas and his motley crew of 'Greek brigands, Corfiote renegades and Italian Counts'⁷⁴ - was to fight its way up the Danube to rendezvous with the army beneath the most formidable Turkish fortress in Europe: Ismail.

Potemkin personally devised the training for the amphibious troops on Ribas's flotilla over the summer: his instructions, which show that the Prince's ideas predated Suvorov's much more famous Art of Victory, reveal his mod­ernity, imagination and military skill. 'Find out who's most fit for precise shooting, who's good at running and who is skilled in swimming,' he demanded in an order that shows he envisaged what we would call marine assault commandos, lightly armed and highly skilled. Simultaneously, in the Caucasus, he also ordered his Kuban and Caucasus generals to destroy the 40,ooo-strong army of Batal-Pasha before moving on the great Ottoman fortress of Anapa.⁷⁵

In August, the Prince of Taurida established new headquarters in the captured fortress of Bender on the Dniester, a convenient place to supervise his armies and navies on all fronts while keeping in contact with Warsaw, Vienna and Petersburg. Here, in this half-destroyed Tartar town, surrounded by steppes, he indulged himself in a Sardanapalian effulgence that beggared even his Jassy Court.

New campaign, new mistress: his relationship with Praskovia Potemkin, whom he had loved for two years, ended in Jassy and she was sent to join her complaisant husband in the field. As armies marched, barges rowed and fleets sailed, Potemkin may have enjoyed a short affair with Ekaterina Samoilova, the lascivious niece-by-marriage who had loved Damas at Ochakov. Ligne wrote to say he 'tenderly loved' Potemkin and was jealous that he was missing 'the beautiful eyes, beautiful smile and noble indifference of Madame Samoilova'.

However, she did not last long because Praskovia's place as 'favourite sultana' was then taken by Princess Ekaterina Dolgorukaya, just twenty-one years old and said to be the prettiest girl in Russia. 'Her beauty struck me,' wrote the painter Vigee Lebrun. 'Her features had something Greek mixed with something Jewish about them, above all in profile.' Her long dark hair, let down carelessly, fell on her shoulders. She had full lips, light blue-grey eyes, ivory skin and splendid figure.⁷⁶ Potemkin's Court was also enlivened by the arrival of exiles from the French Revolution who had volunteered to fight for Russia.

One of them was Alexandre, Comte de Langeron, a veteran of the American War, who was precisely the sort of Gallo-centric aristocrat who sneered at primitive Russians - and was so outraged by Potemkin's sybaritic splendour that his account regurgitates every malicious lie he heard. Langeron's (and Ligne's) bitter memoirs of Potemkin have dominated his historical image in the West ever since. Yet Langeron ended a disappointed man, unjustly cash­iered by Alexander I after the Battle of Austerlitz, then forgiven, and later appointed governor-general of the south, in which job he lasted a year. 'Incapable of commanding a corps,' wrote Wiegel, 'he got command of a country.' Only after these failures was he big enough to recognize Potemkin's greatness and pen a passionate tribute.

Langeron was joined by his more gifted compatriot, the twenty-four-year- old Armand du Plessis, Due de Richelieu, who left us a less prejudiced account of life with Serenissimus. This admirable aristocrat, with fine, serious features, curly locks and sardonic eyes, was a great-nephew of Louis XIII's Cardinal and a grandson of Louis XV's swashbuckling Field-Marshal. He inherited the cool shrewdness of the former and the cosmopolitan tolerance of the latter.⁷⁷

Ten days and nights on the road staying at dimly lit inns had not prepared Richelieu for the spectacle that struck his eyes on entering the Prince's salon in the Pasha's Palace in Bender: 'a divan stuffed with gold under a superb baldaquin; five charming women with all the taste and careless elegance possible, and the sixth dressed with all the magnificence of Greek costume, lay on sofas in the Oriental manner'. Even the carpet was interwoven with gold. Flowers, gold and rubies were strewn around. Filigree scent-boxes wafted exquisite Arabian perfumes - 'Asiatic magic'. Potemkin himself, wearing a voluminous sable-edged coat with the diamond stars of the Orders of St Andrew and St George, and little else, sat among them - but closest to Princess Dolgorukaya, who was daringly wearing Turkic costume like an odalisque (except the pantaloons). She never left his side.

Supper was served in a hall by tall Cuirassiers with silver belts and breast­plates, red capes and high fur hats surmounted by a tuft of feathers. They walked 'two by two in pairs ... like the Guards in tragedy plays', while the orchestra performed. Richelieu was introduced to Potemkin, who greeted him shyly. He was then relieved him to lose himself in the crowd and find his friends Damas and Langeron.⁷⁸ The Prince, wrote Richelieu, surpassed 'all that the imagination can define as the most absolute. Nothing is impossible 444 ^the apogee

to his power - he commands today from Mount Caucasus to the Danube and he also shares with the Empress the rest of the Government of the Empire.'⁷⁹ Fifty officers were gathered at the end of the brightly illuminated salon keeping their distance and waiting on the Prince. 'Here one saw a dethroned Sultan, established for three years in the Prince's antechamber, then another Sovereign who became a Cossack Colonel, there one saw an apostate Pasha, here a Macedonian and then further along Persian ambassadors'⁸⁰ - and amid this bazaar sat Samuel Bentham, waiting for his papers to go home. Potemkin felt this Court lacked a painter, specifically the only artist ever allowed to paint him properly - Lampi. So he wrote to Kaunitz in Vienna, asking him to despatch the artist to Bender: 'It relaxes my mind to have good painters around me who work under my gaze.'⁸¹

'All that can serve the pleasure of a capital city', noted Richelieu, 'accom­panies Prince Potemkin in the midst of camps and the tumult of armies.'⁸² The surreal daily life there resembled Petersburg with its little suppers, musical recitals, gambling, love affairs, jealousies, 'all that beauty inspires with the delicious, cruel, and perfidious'.⁸³ The Prince existed in a bizarre world so rarefied that 'the word "impossible" had to be deleted from the grammar'. It was said that the magnificence with which he celebrated his love for Dol- gorukaya 'surpassed all that we read in iooi Nights'.⁸⁴ Whatever she wanted from the four corners of the world, she got. There were no longer any limits. The Princess said she liked dancers. When Potemkin heard of two captains who were the best gypsy dancers in Russia, he sent for them by courier - even though they were in the Caucasus. When they finally arrived, they danced daily, after dinner - one dressed as a girl, the other as a peasant. 'I've never seen a better dance in all my life,' recalled Potemkin's adjutant, Engelhardt.⁸⁵ The Prince decided to build a subterranean palace for the Princess: he was bored with moving between his palace and the residences of his sultanas, so two regiments of Grenadiers worked for two weeks to build this trogledytic residence. When it was finished, Potemkin decorated its interior with Greek columns, velvet sofas and 'every imaginable luxury'.⁸⁶ Even Russians were awestruck by such extravagance, but the entire Russian army spent the winter in their zemliankas and the officers' dug-outs were 'as comfortable as houses' with thatched roofs and chimneys.⁸⁷ Potemkin of course went considerably further: there was a gallery for the orchestra but the sound was slightly 'dulled', which produced an even finer resonance. The inner sanctum of this underground pleasure dome was, like the seraglio, a series of more and more secret rooms: outside there were the generals. Then the apartment itself was divided into two: in the first men gambled day and night, but the second contained a divan where the Prince lay, surrounded by his harem, but always closer and closer to Princess Dolgorukaya.

Ignoring the rules of civilized adultery, 'alive with passion and reassured by his excess of despotism', Potemkin sometimes forgot that the others were even there and caressed the Princess with 'excessive familiarity' as if she was just a low-born courtesan, instead of one of Russia's grandest noblewomen. The Princess would then laughingly repulse him.⁸⁸ When her friend Countess Golovina arrived, she was repelled by this tainted passion 'based on vanity'. Virtuous Golovina initially believed Dolgorukaya's insistence that there was no sexual relationship with Serenissimus, who was thirty years older. But then Dolgorukaya could not restrain herself any longer and suddenly 'gave way to a coquetry so shocking' that all was revealed.⁸⁹ Her husband Vasily Dolgorukay interrupted Potemkin's fun whenever possible. Langeron says Serenissimus seized him by the collar and shouted: 'You miserable man, it's me who gave you all those medals, none of which you deserved! You are nothing but mud and I'll make of you what I wish!' The Frenchman com­mented, 'this scene would have caused some astonishment in Paris, London or Vienna'.⁹⁰

On one occasion, maybe during Sard's Ochakov cannonade, the Prince arranged his Ekaterinoslav Grenadiers with their hundred cannons and forty blank cartridges for each soldier in a square around the subterranean palace. The drummers drummed. He cavorted inside the underground palace with the Princess and, at a supreme moment, gave the sign to fire. When her husband heard of this orgasmic salvo, he commented with a shrug, 'What a lot of noise about nothing.'⁹¹

Potemkin excelled himself at Princess Dolgorukaya's birthday-dinner. Dessert was served. The guests were amazed to find their crystal goblets filled with diamonds instead of bonbons, which were served to them piled on long spoons. Even the spoilt Princess, sitting beside Potemkin, was impressed. 'It's all for your sake,' he whispered. 'When it's you I fete, what astonishes you?'⁹²

Potemkin's indolence was always more apparent than real, but it served to confirm every foreign prejudice about Russian barbarism. Yet at the very moment when Langeron claimed he spent his time canoodling with Dol­gorukaya, the archives attest that he had never worked so hard, or on such a colossal canvas. He was overseeing the building of his towns in such detail that he was specifying the shape of Nikolaev's churchbells, the position of its fountains and the angle of the batteries around its Admiralty; supervising Faleev's building of more gunboats and ships-of-the-line at the Ingul ship­yards; reorganizing the war in the Caucasus and Kuban (sacking his commander there, Bibikov, for bungling the march on Anapa through 'incom­petence and negligence', and appointing his successors), discussing the strat­egy of his flotilla with Ribas while ordering him to investigate financial abuse by officers. He also devised a new signalling system for the fleet and training for its gunners.

On Polish matters, he finally agreed with Princess Lubomirska to grant her his Dubrovna estate as part of the payment for Smila.* He was instructing the Russian ambassadors to Warsaw, Stackelberg, then Bulgakov, on Russian policy, and receiving secret reports from Baron d'Asch in Warsaw about the Polish Revolution, dealing with King Stanislas-Augustus' complaints about his Cossacks stealing Polish horses, and discussing his Hetmanate and secret Polish plans with pro-Russian magnates. Serenissimus was constantly reform­ing and improving the army, adding more light cavalry and ever more Cos­sacks, but he was also intent on deliberately watering down the aristocratic content of the elite Guards Regiments, promoting foreigners, Cossacks and Old Believers, much to the disgust of the higher nobility. He told Catherine that the officers of the Preobrazhensky had been 'weakened by luxury'. He was therefore involved in a little more than just the seduction of Dolgorukaya. 'My occupations are innumerable,' he told Princess Lubormirska in a slight exaggeration. 'They do not leave me a moment to think about myself.'⁹³

Then there was the international situation. The Poles were arming them­selves: if they backed Prussia too closely, 'it will be time to proceed to your plan', Catherine told Grand Hetman Potemkin.⁹⁴ Worst of all, the British and Prussians were now cooking up a war to stop the Russians. Catherine and Potemkin watched the storm clouds cautiously, though both had cheered up since the Swedish peace. Catherine confided that she was so 'merry' that her dresses were getting tight and needed to be let out. Nevertheless, she missed her consort: 'I often feel, my friend, that on many occasions, I would like to talk to you for a quarter of an hour.'⁹⁵ When the Prussian minister fainted and hit his head on the throne at Catherine's Swedish peace celebrations, they saw it as a good omen. But the 'extremely tired' Catherine, so like Potemkin, always became ill once the tension broke. Now she almost collapsed. She confided she had a 'strong bout of diarrhoea' and 'colic wind'.⁹⁶

The Prince was now the bogeyman of Prussians and Polish Patriots, who were assailing his regal ambitions; and, since 1789, there had been moves afoot in the Sejm to annul his indigenat and confiscate his Polish estates, involving him in yet more complex negotiations.⁹⁷ Perhaps dreaming of retirement and security, he asked Catherine to grant him some southern land he had noticed: 'I've got enough but there is no place I could lay my head pleasantly.' She granted it and sent him a gold coffee set and a diamond ring.⁹⁸ There was one more burst of negotiating before Potemkin realized that only war would force the Turks to the table while Prussia and England were encouraging them. 'I'm bored by Turkish fairy-tales,' Potemkin told his negotiator, Lazhkarev. 'Explain to them that if they want peace, do it more quickly - or I'll defeat them.'⁹⁹ It was to be war.

In March, he had assumed personal command of the Black Sea Fleet and

* Potemkin's Dubrovna appears in the history of Napoleon. The Emperor was to stay in Princess Lubomir- ska's manorhouse in November 1812 during the Retreat from Moscow.

appointed Rear-Admiral Fyodor Ushakov as his deputy - another of his outstanding choices. On 24 June, he ordered him to sea to 'confront the enemy'. After inspecting the fleet himself, he sent him out again on 3 July: 'Pray to God He will help us. Put all hopes in Him, cheer up the crews and inspire them for battle .. .'.^IO° Ushakov twice defeated the Turks, on 8 July, and 28/29 August off Tendra, blowing up their flagship. It was only seven years since Serenissimus had founded the fleet. 'In the north you've multiplied the Fleet,' Potemkin told Catherine, 'but here you've created it out of noth­ing.'¹⁰¹ She agreed that it was their baby - 'an enterprise of our own, hence close to our hearts'.¹⁰² Potemkin now ordered his flotilla to fight its way into the Danube. 'I've ordered the Sebastopol Fleet to sea,' he told Ribas, 'and to make itself visible to you. You and your flotilla should be ready to join them at the mouth of the Danube ... Inform me of everything.'¹⁰³ In September, Potemkin rushed down to Nikolaev and the Crimea to inspect the fleets and then ordered the army to advance south towards the Danube.

On another coast of the Black Sea, there was more good news: on 30 September, General Herman eliminated a 25,ooo-strong Turkish army and captured Batal-Pasha. 'We hardly lost 40 men!', Potemkin told Bezborodko.¹⁰⁴ Nearer home, he ordered the taking of Kilia on the Danube, which failed bloodily on the first attempt because Ribas had not yet managed to destroy the Turkish Danube flotilla. Potemkin attempted a second storming and Kilia fell on 18 October 1790.¹⁰⁵ Ribas broke into the Danube two days later and took Tulcha and Isackcha, as he worked his way up towards mighty Ismail. The Prince trusted and admired Ribas. 'Having you there,' he wrote, 'I leave it under your command.'¹⁰⁶ By the end of November, the entire lower Danube as far as Galatz was his - except for Ismail. Potemkin decided to take the fortress. 'I will make an attempt on Ismail,' he said, 'but I don't want to lose ten men.'¹⁰⁷

Far to the west, Richelieu, Langeron and the Prince de Ligne's son Charles were dining in Vienna, where they had gone to grumble about Potemkin's inactivity, when they heard of Batal-Pasha's defeat and the investment of Ismail. They left immediately and galloped to re-enlist with Potemkin at Bender. 'I beg Your Highness to let me rejoin the army before Ismail,' Langeron wrote to him.¹⁰⁸ No young sabre wanted to miss the assault - the climax of Potemkin's military career and one of the bloodiest days of the century.

SEA OF SLAUGHTER: ISMAIL

All that the devil would do if run stark mad, All that defies the worst which pen expresses,

All which by hell is peopled, or as sad As hell, mere mortals who their power abuse Was here (as heretofore and since) let loose.

Lord Byron, the storming of Ismail, Don Juan, Canto VIII: 123

On 23 November 1790, some 31,000 Russian troops, under Lieutenant- Generals Ivan Gudovich, Pavel Potemkin and Alexander Samoilov, and the flotilla, commanded by Major-General de Ribas, invested indomitable Ismail. The season was late; sickness decimated the hungry army. Only the tough and talented Ribas had the stomach for an assault. The other three generals argued among themselves. None had the prestige on his own to force through the storming of an almost impregnable fortress.¹ Ismail was built into a natural amphitheatre which was defended by 265 cannons and a garrison of 35,000 men, the strength of a medium-sized army. It was a semi-circle of formidable walls, deep ditches, interlocking towers, perpendicular palisades and redoubts, with the River Danube as the flat diameter. French and German engineers had recently reinforced its 'brilliantly constructed' battlements.²

Potemkin watched from Bender because, if Ismail did not fall, he did not wish the prestige of the entire army to be affected.³ The Prince saw no need to live more austerely at this crucial moment. On the contrary, he continued to suffer from a surfeit of choice on the feminine front. His ardour for Princess Dolgorukaya was cooling. The rising 'sultana', Madame de Witte, remained at his side. Countess Branicka was said to be on her way, and 'Madame L.' - the wife of General Lvov - 'is coming and bringing a young girl of fifteen or sixteen, beautiful as Cupid', a courtesan and the 'Prince's latest victim', reported a well-informed if hostile witness.⁴ He appeared as sybaritic as ever. He was 'enchanted' when Richelieu, Langeron and young Ligne arrived in Bender, but he did not mention whether he was going to storm Ismail or not. Langeron asked, but 'no one opened their mouths'. The three joined the army at Ismail.⁵

ismail 449

Unbeknown to the generals in Ismail and most historians of the siege, the Prince had already decided that the commanders on the scene were not capable of taking the city. He had therefore summoned the one man he knew could take it, Suvorov. 'With God's help, capture the town,' Potemkin wrote to him on 25 November, adding, 'there are a lot of generals there of equal rank and so it's turned into a sort of indecisive parliament'. The Prince advised Suvorov that Ismail's walls on the river side were the weakest and he recommended only two soldiers on the spot: 'Ribas will help you ... and you'll be pleased with Kutuzov.' On both counts, posterity would agree with Potemkin's judgement. 'Make the arrangements and, with a prayer to God, do it.'⁶ Suvorov set off immediately for Ismail.

The camp there was a picture of Russian administrative chaos and poor leadership. The Prince had ordered the artillery forward and demanded the capture of the city 'at any cost'.⁷ On 25 November (the same day Potemkin had summoned Suvorov), Gudovich chaired a faltering war council at which Ribas demanded a full assault and the others vacillated. Ribas appealed to the Prince, who secretly wrote back, on 28 November, that Suvorov was on his way and so 'all difficulties will be swept away'. On 2 December, Gudovich held another council and ordered a retreat. Ribas was furious. 'The comedy is over,'⁸ wrote a disgusted officer to a friend. They repacked the artillery; the troops began to march away. Ribas appealed to the Prince while his flotilla rowed back to Galatz.⁹

At Bender, Potemkin maintained his insouciant and debauched facade, never letting on that Suvorov was on his way to take command. He was said to be playing cards with his harem when Madame de Witte, pretending to tell his fortune, foretold he would take Ismail within three weeks. Potemkin laughed that he had a more infallible way than fortune-telling - Suvorov - as if he had just had the idea over cards. Serenissimus enjoyed playing such games with his gullible courtiers - but his obscurity was deliberate. Indeed he boasted to Catherine that he had kept his true intentions from the enemy and his own staff. 'The slaughterer must never show his knife,' he once wrote. 'Secrecy is the soul of war.'¹⁰

When news of Gudovich's withdrawal reached the disdainful Prince, he treated the general to a dose of his sarcasm and appointed him to command the Caucasus and Kuban corps: 'I can see you had a huge discussion about actions against Ismail but I don't find anything harmful to the enemy ... As you have not seen the Turks at close quarters except after they've been captured, I'm sending you General Suvorov who will show you how ...'." Potemkin knew it was impossible to 'oversuvorov Suvorov.'

Count Suvorov-Rimniksky approached Ismail, turned back the retreating troops and recalled Ribas's flotilla. Suvorov entered the camp on 2 December, looking more 'like a Tartar than the general of a European army', a little scarecrow riding all alone except for one Cossack orderly.¹² Despite (or perhaps because of) his peculiarities, spending nights singing, eating on the floor at odd times and rolling naked on the ground, Suvorov inspired con­fidence. He reorganized the artillery batteries, oversaw the making of ladders and fascines to fill the ditches, and trained the troops on mock-ups of the walls. Serenissimus waited tensely in Bender - but he deliberately gave Suvorov a narrow escape-route if he really judged Ismail impregnable. This was not uncertainty, simply a sensible reminder to Suvorov not to risk Russian men and prestige if the assault was impossible. After all, the Turks were convinced Ismail really was impregnable.¹³

On 7 December, a trumpeter was sent up to the fortress with letters from Pot­emkin and Suvorov demanding that Ismail surrender to avoid what the Prince called shedding the 'harmless blood of women and children'.¹⁴ Suvorov was more direct: if Ismail resisted, 'nobody will be spared'.¹⁵ The Turks responded defiantly by parading round the ramparts, already decorated by many banners - presenting, thought Richelieu, 'a most picturesque vision of this multitude of magnificently dressed men'.¹⁶ When the Seraskier asked for a ten-day truce, Suvorov rejected this delaying tactic. Ribas planned the assault. After a war council on 9 December, Suvorov ordered the storming of Ismail from all sides - six columns on the land side and four across the Danube. 'Tomorrow,' Suvorov told the army, 'either the Turks or the Russians will be buried at Ismail.'¹⁷ The Seraskier, like a voice already beyond the grave, declared: 'The Danube will stop its course, the heavens will fall to earth before Ismail surrenders.'¹⁸

At з a.m. on 11 December, the heavens did fall to earth. A sustained artillery barrage pounded the fortress before a rocket zigzagged across the sky to give the order to advance. The Turkish artillery took a murderous toll on the attackers. Ismail was, recalled Langeron, a 'spectacle of horror and beauty' as the ram­parts were crowned with flames.¹⁹ Damas, who commanded a column attacking across the Danube, was one of the first atop the walls: as Potemkin had seen, the river side was weakest. On the land side, the first two columns had broken into the town, but Kutuzov's spearhead was beaten back twice with terrible losses. Suvorov was supposed to have sent him a note congratulating him on taking Ismail and appointing him its governor. This encouraged him to throw himself at the walls a third and successful time. A priest brandishing a crucifix, with bullets ricocheting off it, brought up the reserve. By the time the sun rose, all the columns were on the ramparts, but several had not yet descended into the streets. Then the Russians poured into Ismail like a 'torrent that floods the countryside'. The hand-to-hand fighting between 60,000 armed soldiers now reached its bloodiest: even as late as midday, the battle was not decided.²⁰

Ismail assumed the incarnadine horror of a Dantean hell. As the 'urso- maniacs' screamed 'Hurrah' and 'Catherine II', and the Turks fell back, they were overtaken again by the lust for havoc, a fever of blood madness to kill everything they could find. 'The most horrible carnage followed,' remembered Damas, 'the most unequalled butchery. It is no exaggeration to say that the gutters of the town were dyed with blood. Even women and children fell victims to the rage.' The screams of children did not stop the Russians. A Turk ran out of a building and pointed his gun at Damas, but it did not fire and the 'poor wretch' was killed instantly by his men.

Four thousand Tartar horses escaped from the underground stables to stampede over the dead and dying, their frantic hooves pulping the human flesh and shattering the skulls of the dying, until they themselves were but­chered. The Seraskier and 4,000 men were still defending the bastion on which his green tent was pitched. When they were about to surrender, an English sailor in Russian service tried to capture the Turkish general and shot him down but was himself pierced with fifteen bayonets. At this the Russians sank into a grim orgy of death, methodically working their way through the entire 4,000 men, of whom not one survived.

The Turks awaited their death with a resignation that Richelieu had never seen. 'I won't try to paint the horror which froze all my senses.' But he managed to save the life of a ten-year-old girl whom he found soaked in blood and surrounded by four women with their throats cut. Two Cossacks were about to kill her when he took her hand and 'I had the pleasure to see that my little prisoner had no other harm than a light scratch on her face probably from the same sword that had killed her mother.' A Tartar prince, Kaplan Giray, and his five sons, proud descendants of Genghis Khan, made a last stand in the bastion: the father fell last surrounded by the wreath formed by the bodies of his brave sons.

The massacre resembled a macabre pantomime as the resistance ebbed. The blood-crazed Russians draped themselves in every piece of clothing they could find - masculine or feminine. They stripped their victims before killing them to preserve their clothes. They pillaged the Turkish shops, so the delicious smell of spices pervaded the air torn by the cries of the dying. Unrecognizable Cossacks, more terrifying than ever in wigs and dresses, marauded through the fragrant spicy streets, knee deep in a marsh of mud-congealed cadavers, reeking of blood, wielding dripping swords and pursing naked unfortunates as horses whinnied and galloped, dogs barked and children screamed.

The heat

Of carnage, like Nile's sun-sodden slime, Engendered monstrous shapes of every crime.

The bodies themselves were piled so high that Langeron found it impossible not to walk on them. Richelieu, still holding the hand of his child, met Damas, and the two had to clear bodies to let the little girl walk along. The massacre continued until four in the afternoon, when the Turks finally surrendered.

The glow

Of burning streets, like moonlight on the water, Was imaged back in blood, the sea of slaughter.

Ismail's surviving senior Pasha laid out some carpets on the ground in the middle of the ruined fortress, surrounded by the bodies of his massacred compatriots, and smoked a pipe as tranquilly as if he was still sitting in his seraglio. Thus was conquered 'one of the keys of the Ottoman Empire'.²¹ Almost 40,000 died²² in one of the greatest military massacres of the century.

On a scrap of paper, now yellowed and almost smelling of gunpowder, Suvorov told Potemkin: 'Nations and walls fell before the throne of Her Imperial Majesty. The assault was murderous and long. Ismail is taken on which I congratulate Your Highness.'²³

The Prince was 'as happy, as affectionate as a Sultan'.²⁴ He ordered the guns to be fired to celebrate and at once wrote to Catherine, sending the new favourite's brother, Valerian Zubov, whom he liked, with the news - which he recounted with all due credit to Suvorov. 'I congratulate you with my whole heart,'²⁵ Catherine replied. The hostile Langeron claimed that the man who had not wanted to lose ten men a month earlier now boasted, 'What are 10,000-12,000 men to the cost of such a conquest?' Potemkin may have played the bloodthirsty conqueror, but it is more revealing that he never visited Ismail, despite planning to do so daily: he fell ill, as he often did after the suspense was over, but he also had no wish to parade through the 'hideous spectacle'.²⁶ He finally sent Popov instead. He was certainly delighted with his victory, but he was also profoundly upset about Russian casualties - he lost his great-nephew Colonel Alexander Raevsky, one of two brothers who were 'dearest of all his nephews'.[101] His attitude was more likely to have been that it was a dirty job well done. He was relieved it had fallen because he and Catherine hoped this would jolt the Turks into a generous peace. Potemkin was also delighted to hear that, when the news reached Vienna, the Prince de Ligne had had to eat his weasel words about his generalship.²⁷

It is said that, when Suvorov arrived in Jassy right after the battle, Potemkin ' received him splendidly and asked, 'How I can reward you for your services?' Suvorov snapped, 'No, Your Highness, I'm not a merchant ... No one can reward me but God and the Empress!' This is fiction that has become history.f The two originals did not meet until February, and their notes to each other were jubilant. When both arrived almost simultaneously in Petersburg, Potemkin continued to praise and promote his favourite commander.²⁸ Serenissimus moved the army into winter quarters and travelled over to his

'capital', Jassy. As the entourage approached, Richelieu noticed the light rising from the town, illuminated by torches of a fete in Potemkin's honour. However, the Prince was reluctant to linger in Jassy.²⁹

Potemkin wanted to return to Petersburg with the prestige of a supreme commander who had won victories in a theatre of war 'making almost a quarter of the globe, everywhere with success'. He may not have had the bloodcurdling, bayoneting dash of Suvorov but, as a strategist and overall military and naval commander, he had not lost a single battle. In a letter to Catherine, he could not resist comparing his victories to those of Prince Eugene of Savoy and Frederick the Great, yet he claimed he was avoiding the sin of pride, after her 'maternal advice in the last campaign'. He looked back at his life and thanked Catherine for her favour, 'which you showed to me from my first youth'. He concluded: 'Since I belong to you, all my wonderful successes belong to you too.'

Catherine and Potemkin were not old, but they were no longer young. They lived on their nerves and the years of power had made them more imperious and more sensitive. Yet they still cared for one another, gently and lovingly. The siege of Ismail had taken a toll on both of them. The partners exchanged news of their illnesses. 'My health is improving,' Catherine wrote, 'I think it's gout which has reached my stomach and bowels but I cure it with pepper and a glass of malaga wine which I drink daily.' He was ill in Jassy but, when he heard about her illness, he agreed with her malaga wine and pepper, but added that she must 'always keep your stomach warm. I kiss your hands, foster-mother.'³⁰ He had been away from Petersburg for almost two years and asked Catherine if he could come home. 'It's extremely necessary for me to be with you for a short time,' he wrote from Jassy on 11 January 1791. Poland was probably the main subject he wanted to discuss with her in person. 'Let me have a look at you.'³¹

She wanted to see him - Walking's better than writing', she agreed - but she asked him to wait a little. This has been interpreted as the beginning of his fall from grace and her apprehension that he would return to Petersburg to try to remove Zubov. But her letters do not read like that, though there were certainly tensions between them. He was frustrated at her rigidity towards appeasing Prussia. He also knew that, in the capital, the Prussians, the Poles and their friends, the Grand Duke Paul and various Masonic Lodges, were trying to undermine him, claiming he wanted to be king of Poland. He suspected Zubov too was plotting against him. But he remained confident of his eternal 'sacred' ties with the Empress: 'I don't doubt your permanent favour.'³²

Catherine certainly did not act as if she was losing the fondness of a lifetime. On the contrary, she showered him with gifts and even bought the Taurida Palace again - for 460,000 roubles - to pay his debts. But an amused Potemkin noticed that the diamonds on the Order of St Andrew, sent by the Empress, 454 ^the apogee

were fakes, made of crystal - surely a symbol of an increasingly sclerotic Court.³³ She simply asked him to wait a few weeks in the south so as not to miss the chance of making peace with the Turks after the triumph of Ismail. Its fall had indeed shattered Istanbul.³⁴

If a peace could be negotiated with the Porte, Russia could afford to turn to the problem of Poland: its Four-Year Sejm was drafting a constitution that it hoped would make it a strong and viable kingdom and therefore a threat to Russia. Potemkin, who dominated Russia's policies towards both Poland and the Porte, proposed to Catherine that they force the Turks to cede Moldavia to Poland and thus turn the Poles against the Prussians.³⁵ But it all depended on the Turks. Now Britain and Prussia threw them a lifeline - the 'Ochakov Crisis'.

Even before the fall of Ismail, the Triple Alliance had been planning to foil Russian aggrandizement. Until now, Prussia had driven the coalition against Russia and it was mainly due to Frederick William's inept, inconsistent diplomacy that more damage had not been done. Now Britain, freed from the Nootka Sound Crisis with Spain, took the lead against Russia for both commercial and political reasons. The worsening of relations between Britain and Russia had begun with Catherine's Armed Neutrality, and the ending of the Anglo-Russian commercial treaty in 1786, followed by the signing of a Franco-Russian one the next year. This led to a feeling that Britain was too dependent on Russian naval supplies and should instead trade more with Poland. Britain was alarmed by Russia's ascendancy over eastern Europe, especially after the fall of Ismail promised a victorious peace with the Turks. William Pitt, the Prime Minister, therefore aimed to create 'a federative system' of alliances with Poland and Prussia, among others, to force Russia to accept a peace based on the status quo ante bellum. If Russia did not agree to give up Ochakov and other gains, it would be attacked by the Royal Navy at sea and Prussia on land. It certainly looked as if Britain was going to war merely to 'pluck a feather from the cap of the Empress'.³⁶

Selim III was unlikely to make peace with Russia when Britain was arming a fleet to bombard Petersburg. The Sultan executed his latest Grand Vizier, reappointed the hawkish Yusuf-Pasha and gathered another army. Pitt and the Prussians prepared their ultimatum, their armies and their warships. The Prince was needed in Petersburg: now he could go home.

On 10 February 1791, he set out from Jassy. It was said that he joked that he was going to Petersburg to remove Zubov and 'extract the tooth' - zub meaning tooth - though, in the midst of the Ochakov Crisis, he had more important matters to discuss. Petersburg waited his arrival with greater apprehension than ever. 'All the ministers are seized with panic,' fearing the Prince, wrote the Swedish envoy Count Curt Stedingk to King Gustavus III on 8 February.³⁷ 'Everyone is in agitation' at the prospect of the 'apparition of this phenomenon'. Government stopped: 'No one dares, and no one can, decide anything before the arrival.'³⁸

ismail 455

'Madame,' Stedingk asked the Empress at Court, 'should one believe the gossip that Prince Potemkin will bring peace?'

'I know nothing of it but it's possible,' replied Catherine, adding that Serenissimus was original and very clever and he would do everything he could and that she let him. Then she mused revealingly: 'He loves to prepare me surprises.'

The Court carriages were sent to await his arrival, the roads illuminated with torches nightly for a week. Count Bruce led the welcoming delegation, waiting in a hut by the roadside from Moscow, not even daring to undress. Bezborodko rode out to prearrange tactics with Potemkin.³⁹ Frederick William gathered 88,000 men in East Prussia, Lord Hood amassed an 'armament' of thirty-six ships-of-the-line and twenty-nine smaller vessels at Spithead - and the Prince of Taurida, trailing a dazzling new mistress, prepared for war and for the most extravagant ball in the history of Russia.⁴⁰

PART EIGHT

The Last Dance

1791

З¹

THE BEAUTIFUL GREEK

First, test yourself to see if you are a coward; if you aren't, fortify your innate bravery by spending much time with your enemies. Prince Potemkin's advice to his great-nephew N. N. Raevsky, the future hero

of 1812 and friend of A. S. Pushkin

When Potemkin swept into Petersburg on 28 February 1791 - his way emblazoned with hundreds of torches¹ - the Empress hurried to meet him. She presented him with the Taurida Palace once again - she had only just bought it from him. The Anglo-Prussian coalition's threat of war was Russia's gravest crisis since the days of Pugachev and the two old partners met anxiously every day, while the nobility and diplomats outdid each other to celebrate Serenissimus' return.

'In spite of the great expectation I had had of this event, and all I had heard of the importance and power of this man, the train, the fracas, the excitement, that accompanied him, amazed me, and I still have its effects before my eyes,' wrote Jean-Jacob Jennings, a Swedish diplomat. 'Since this Prince arrived, there is no other subject of conversation in all society, in all high houses or lower, than of him - what he does or will do, whether he dines or will dine or has dined. The interest... of the public is on him alone - all the tributes, respects, offerings of all classes of citizens - lords, artisans, merchants, writers - all sit at his door and fill his anterooms.'²

The Prince of Taurida appeared all-conquering: 'His credit and authority have never been greater,' noticed the Swedish envoy Stedingk. 'All that shone before his arrival is eclipsed and all Russia is at his feet.'³ There was an outpouring of admiration - and envy from some of the magnates.⁴ The Russian 'public', so far as it existed, meaning the lower nobility and the merchants, hero-worshipped him. Ladies wore his picture on medallions - 'Her pearl-like bosom heaving sighs,' wrote Derzhavin, 'A hero's image animates.'⁵ The specially written 'Ode to Potemkin' was recited at receptions.⁶ Every grandee had to give a ball in what was called 'The Carnival of Prince Potemkin'.⁷

Catherine herself seemed relieved and delighted to see Serenissimus after so long. 'Victory has embellished him,' she told Grimm. Potemkin was now 'handsome as the day, gay as a lark, brilliant as a star, more spiritual than ever, no longer biting his nails, giving parties every day. Everyone is enchanted, despite the envious.'⁸ The Prince had never been more charming. Even Augustyn Deboli, the hostile envoy of Revolutionary Poland, reported that Potemkin was so polite that he mischievously asked everyone if they noticed how his behaviour was altered.⁹

This is how Potemkin appeared at his apogee in March 1791. 'I saw for the first time this extraordinary man last Sunday in the circle of the Grand Duke,' gushed Jennings. 'He had been described as very ugly. I did not find him so. On the contrary, he has an imposing presence and that eye defect does not influence his face as badly as you would expect.' Potemkin wore the white uniform of the Grand Admiral of the Black Sea Fleet, covered in diamonds and medals. As soon as this Grand Admiral appeared, the 'circle around the Grand Duke disappeared and it formed around Prince Potemkin exactly as if we saw in him the person of our Master'. Even princes of Wiirttemberg stood upright and immobile 'like statues, eyes fixed on the great man, waiting for him to deign to gratify them with a look'.¹⁰

'The Potemkin Carnival' meant a fete every night. The courtiers - Nikolai Saltykov, Zavadovsky, Ivan Chernyshev, Bezborodko, Osterman, Stroganov and Bruce - competed to hold the most extravagant ball. Some almost ruined themselves, trying to keep up with the Stroganovs. But they were confused about the identity of the Prince's latest mistress. The courtiers prepared to give balls in honour of his 'sultana', Princess Dolgorukaya, until they noticed that he never visited her. She claimed to be ill - yet he still did not visit, not even once, at which point the cowardly courtiers cancelled their balls and the crestfallen Princess had to retire to Moscow.¹¹ On 18 March, the Prince de Nassau-Siegen gave one of the most expensive parties, with plates piled with sturgeon and sterlet, Potemkin's favourite delicacy. There, Serenissimus, wearing his superb jewel-encrusted grand hetman's uniform that Deboli claimed cost 900,000 roubles,¹² unveiled his other favourite dish: Madame de Witte, the most intriguing adventuress of all.

The appearance at Nassau's ball of 'this beauty of renown' was 'the greatest sensation', according to a goggle-eyed Jennings. When Potemkin had finished his card game, he rushed over to her and talked only to her, while everyone else stared: 'all the women were agitated, men too - the former with despair, irritation and a lot of curiosity, the latter with desire and expectation'.¹³

Sophie de Witte, now twenty-five years old, with blonde curls, a noble Grecian face and violet eyes, was 'the prettiest woman in Europe in that era'. She rose from teenage courtesan in Constantinople to one of the richest countesses of Poland: for forty years, she astonished and scandalized Europe with her 'beauty, vice and crimes'. Born in a Greek village on the outskirts of 'the city of the world's desire', she was nicknamed the 'Beautiful Greek' or 'La Belle Phanariote' after the Greek Phanar district. Her mother, who traded vegetables, sold her at twelve to the Polish Ambassador, who procured girls for King Stanislas-Augustus, while her equally fine sister was sold to a senior Ottoman pasha. From then on, every time she was bought, another man fell in love with her and outbid the first. So, on her way with the ambassadorial baggage, Sophie de Tchelitche, as she then called herself, was spotted by Major de Witte, son of the Governor of the Polish fortress of Kamenets- Podolsk, who bought her for 1,000 ducats and married her in 1779 aged fourteen. Witte sent her off to Paris with Princess Nassau-Siegen to learn manners - and French.

La Belle Phanariote bewitched Paris. Langeron saw her there and praised 'the tenderest and most beautiful eyes that nature had ever formed', but he was under no illusion about her cunning manipulations and the 'coldness of her heart'.¹⁴ Some of her fascination was 'a sort of originality proceeding from either feigned naivety or ignorance'. In Paris, everyone praised her 'beaux yeux'. When someone asked about her health, she replied, 'My beaux yeux are sore,' which amused everyone enormously.¹⁵ Back in Poland, when Potemkin's War began, her husband, now himself governor of Kamenets, was the linchpin of the Prince's espionage network in southern Poland: it was he who smuggled spies into Khotin hidden with the butter. But it was probably his wife who provided the information: her sister was married to the Pasha of Khotin, while Sophie herself became the mistress of the besieging general, Nikolai Saltykov.¹⁶ But the sharp-eyed Ribas spotted her and introduced her to Potemkin at Ochakov. Visitors to Jassy and Bender noticed her Greek costume and how she posed melodramatically and 'flung herself around', to impress Serenissimus. She became the confidante of his affair with Dol- gorukaya, whom she then supplanted.¹⁷ Potemkin appointed the complaisant husband to be governor of Kherson.¹⁸ It is likely he used her as a secret agent among the Poles and Turks.¹⁹

The Empress, used to her consort's latest paramours, gave the 'Beautiful Greek' a pair of diamond earrings.²⁰ This made Sophie's husband so proud that he boasted she would be remembered in history as the friend of royalty, adding: 'The Prince is not the lover of my wife but just a friend because, if he was her lover, I would break any connection with him.' This simple-minded wishful thinking must have provoked some sniggers. The courtesan-spy clearly fascinated Potemkin - she was an Oriental, an intriguer, a Venus and a Greek, any of which would have attracted him. 'You're the only woman', Potemkin told her, 'who surprises me' to which the minx replied, 'I know. If I'd been your mistress, you'd already have forgotten me. I am only your friend and always will be.' (Ladies are always bound to say this in public: no one close to them believed her.)²¹ Perhaps she broke her own rule, because two weeks later diplomats noticed Potemkin suddenly began to lose interest: had she succumbed against her better judgement?²²

Serenissimus decided to hold a ball to defy the Anglo-Prussian coalition and celebrate Ismail. He was supposed to be negotiating the subsidy that Russia would pay Gustavus III for a Russo-Swedish alliance. It was in Potemkin's interest to play this out because Britain was also offering Sweden a subsidy for the use of its ports in a war against Russia. The threat was serious enough for Potemkin to send Suvorov on 25 April to command the corps facing Sweden as a living warning to Gustavus. The Swedish King was trying to auction his services and Britain offered £200,000, but, once the Ochakov Crisis was over, the price would drop. So Potemkin deliberately delayed negotiations by forcing the Swedish envoy, Stedingk, to sit through the rehearsals for his ball at the Taurida Palace.

Thus Stedingk received a theatrical education - but no diplomatic sat­isfaction at all.²³ Serenissimus, covered in diamonds, seemed preoccupied by diamonds - he looked at diamonds, admired the huge diamonds on his miniature portrait of Catherine, played with diamonds until the stones alone became the subject of conversation.²⁴ Potemkin made Stedingk 'walk through fifty apartments, see and admire everything [then] got me into his carriage, talking only of himself, the Crimea & the Black Sea Fleet.' Next, there were more rehearsals.²⁵ When the Prince got bored with his own spectaculars, his face revealed 'disgust boredom lassitude ... that came from having all desires satisfied, when one is blase about everything and there is nothing left to want'.²⁶

Then he gave an order: '200 musicians, placed in the gallery of the great hall, play ... with the two of us as their only audience. The Prince is in Seventh Heaven. 100 people arrive, they dance, they do another quadrille.' The rehearsals started at 3 p.m. and ended at 9 p.m. 'without one moment to fix the attention of the Prince on Sweden. Such Sire', Stedingk sorrowfully told his King, 'is the man who governs the Empire.'²⁷ Potemkin told everyone who would listen that he was not involved in foreign affairs but thought only about his entertainment.²⁸

The real business was conducted in Catherine's apartments, where the partners struggled to counter an imminent Anglo-Prussian war. After two years apart, they were adapting their relationship to his overbearing dominance and her weary obstinacy. On 16/27 March, Pitt sent off his ultimatum to Petersburg, via Berlin. It was a rash act for the usually cautious British Prime Minister, but thirty-nine ships-of-the-line and 88,000 Prussians were no idle threat. The Empress was determined that there would be no concessions to the Prussians and the English.

In their struggle to find a way out of the trap, Potemkin and Catherine even turned to the leading statesman of the hated French Revolution, Honore Gabriel Riqueti, Comte de Mirabeau. Potemkin thought 'France has gone mad,' and Catherine believed Mirabeau should be hanged, not from just one gallows, but many - and then 'broken on the wheel'. But it was fitting that Potemkin should be in secret contact with Mirabeau, who was his only

European equal in terms of eccentric brilliance, physical scale and extravagant debauchery. (Ironically Mirabeau's father once muttered about his son: 'I know of nobody but the Empress of Russia for whom this man would make a suitable match.') The Prince paid fat bribes to 'Mirabobtcha', as he nicknamed him, in an attempt to persuade France to join Russia against Britain (while in fact Mirabeau advocated entente with London). Mirabeau, already bribed generously by the beleaguered Louis XVI, simply 'consumed' Potemkin's money to pay for his magnificent lifestyle and then fell ill. He died in Paris on 19 March/2 April 1791 - the day after Nassau's ball for Potemkin/⁹ Serenissimus knew that Russia simply could not fight the Triple Alliance and Poland as well as the Turks. So while he prepared the army for a broader war, placing corps on the Dvina and Kiev ready to advance across Poland into Prussia, he was prepared to buy off Frederick William to give Russia a free hand with the Turks and Poles. Catherine did not want to surrender to the coalition. This strained their friendship. Stedingk believed that 'even Her Majesty the Empress' was 'secretly jealous' of Serenissimus. Perhaps that was why Catherine said Potemkin did 'everything she let him do\ Stedingk reported that 'the Empress is no longer what she was ... Age and infirmities have rendered her less capable.' It was now easier to trick her, appeal to her vanity and mislead her. To paraphrase Lord Acton, absolute power coarsens, and both of them had become coarser - the destiny of statesmen who never leave government. Yet Potemkin proudly still treated her as a woman. 'What do you want?', he told the Swede. 'She is a woman - one's got to manage her. One can't rush anything.'³⁰

Actually, it was less personal than that. She was anxious because there was a real divergence in their views, something that had never happened before. She probably worried that he might win, and undermine her authority. Potemkin was irritated that her pride and obstinacy were threatening all their achievements. Would she surrender to Potemkin's superior knowledge of the military situation?³¹

The Prince also wanted to remove the Empress's companion, Platon Zubov, who was increasingly involved in intrigues against him. This must have added to the tension. A politician is never so exposed as when he appears invincible, for it unites his enemies, and Potemkin was beset by attempts to undermine him. Deboli recorded that Zubov, Saltykov and Nassau-Siegen were already intriguing against him, even though 'so many attempts against ... Potemkin failed like this one'.³¹ Yet Zubov was backed by his patron Nikolai Saltykov, Governor of the little Grand Dukes, and therefore connected to Paul, his pro-Prussian circle based at the Gatchina estate, and the Masonic Lodges, particularly the Rosicrucians, linked to Berlin."" Some of these Lodges³³ became rallying-points for criticism of the Catherine-Potemkin regime, espe­cially since so many magnates were Masons - and the Prince was not.³⁴ Paul himself, who so hated Potemkin, was in treasonable correspondence with Berlin.³⁵

Catherine and Potemkin now had little time for nostalgic endearments: they locked horns in bouts of argument and reconciliation as they had done since they fell in love seventeen years earlier. Catherine's belief all those years ago that their arguments were 'always about power, not love' was true enough now. When persuasion failed, Potemkin tried to bully her into changing her policy. Catherine resisted tearfully, though her tears were always as manipulative as his tantrums. Her refusal to make friendly noises towards a power that was about to invade an exhausted Russia was surely foolish. Potemkin, who knew the situation on the ground, was not suggesting sur­render, merely sensible lulling of Frederick William until they had made peace with the Turks.

Potemkin told Catherine's valet, Zakhar Zotov, that there would have to be a row because of the Empress's postponing of the decision. She would not even correspond with Frederick William. Then Serenissimus muttered angrily about Zubov - why did Mamonov leave his place in such a silly way and not wait for Potemkin for arrange things? If the war became absolutely imminent, Potemkin would protect his Turkish gains and satisfy Prussia with a Polish partition. But partition, which would ruin his subtler plans for Poland, was a last resort.³⁶

Catherine and Potemkin argued for days on end. Catherine wept. Potemkin raged. He bit his nails while the tumult hit Catherine in the bowels. By 22 March, Catherine was ill in bed with 'spasms and strong colic'. Even when they rowed, they still behaved like an old husband and wife: Potemkin suggested she take medicine for her bowels but she insisted on relying 'on nature'. The Prince kept up the pressure.³⁷

A little boy, the ten-year-old son of Potemkin's valet, witnessed a row and reconciliation that sound like any couple: the Prince banged the table and left the room slamming the door so hard that the glasses jumped. Catherine burst into tears. Then she noticed the alarmed child, who was no doubt wishing he was elsewhere. She smiled through her tears and gesturing at the absent Potemkin told the boy, 'Go and see how he is.' So the child obediently ran along to Serenissimus' apartments and found him sitting at his desk in the study.

'So it's she who sent you?', asked the Prince.

Yes, replied the child, with the open-hearted courage of the innocent; maybe

Prussia: the fat, dull and dim Frederick William of Prussia supposedly spent evenings communicating with the spirits of Marcus Aurelius, Leibniz and the Great Elector, from whom he hoped to learn greatness. If so, the lessons failed.

Serenissimus should go and comfort Her Imperial Majesty because she was crying and apologizing.

'Let her blub!', said Potemkin callously - but he was too soft-hearted to leave her for long. A few minutes later, he calmed down and went to make friends again.³⁸ Such was their personal and political relationship towards the end of their lives.

'Obstinacy', recorded Catherine's secretary on 7 April, 'leads to new war.' But now the prospect of a war on several fronts - since there was every likelihood that Poland and Sweden would join England, Prussia and Turkey - made Catherine blink. She told her staff that there would no more 'beer and porter' - English products - but on 9 April Potemkin and Bezborodko drafted a memorandum to appease Frederick William enough to distract him from the war. 'How can our recruits fight Englishmen?', Potemkin had grumbled. 'Hasn't Swedish cannon-fire tired [anyone] here?' Catherine was indeed tired of shooting: she buckled and agreed secretly to renew the old Prussian treaty, encourage Poland to agree to the cession of Thorn and Danzig to Prussia, and make peace with the Porte, gaining Ochakov and its hinterland.³⁹ But they prepared for war. 'You'll have news of me if they attack on land or sea,' Catherine wrote to a friend in Berlin, deliberately en clair, and offering no concessions.⁴⁰

The partners did not know that the coalition was collapsing. Before Cath­erine's proposal reached Berlin, the British faltered. Pitt's Government tech­nically won the three Parliamentary debates on the Ochakov Crisis - but lost the argument. On 18/29 March, Charles James Fox scuppered the weak arguments for the naval expedition against Russia with a rousing speech, asking what British interests were at stake in Ochakov, while Edmund Burke attacked Pitt for protecting the Turks - 'a horde of barbaric Asiatics'. Cath­erine's envoy, Simon Vorontsov, rallied the Russian 'lobby' of merchants, from Leeds to London, and primed his own armament of hacks. Ink and paper proved mightier than Prussian steel and British gunpowder. Even the navy was against it: Horatio Nelson could not see 'how we are to get at her fleet. Narrow seas and no friendly ports are bad things.' Within days, 'no war with Russia!' was daubed on walls all over the Kingdom. Cabinet support waned. On 5/16 April, Pitt withdrew his ultimatum and despatched a secret emissary, William Fawkener, to Petersburg to find a way out of the debacle that almost cost him his place.⁴¹

The Prince and Empress were jubilant. Catherine celebrated by placing Fox's statue in her Cameron Galley between Demosthenes and Cicero. Pot­emkin celebrated by happily boasting to the humiliated British envoy, Charles Whitworth, that he and Catherine were 'the spoilt children of Providence'. The Ochakov Crisis posed the Eastern Question to the British for the first time, but they were not yet interested in the survival of 'the sick man of Europe'. Jingo would have to wait. Potemkin had been wrong to force Catherine to negotiate - but only with hindsight. His advice had been sensible.

They had just been fortunate. The Prince believed that he and the Empress shared a lucky star: 'in order to be successful', he told the Englishman, 'they only have to desire it'.⁴²

His masquerade ball, which he had been rehearsing day and night since his return, was to mark Russian triumph over Turks, Prussians and Britons - Catherine and Potemkin's defiant celebration of Providence. His servants galloped around St Petersburg delivering this invitation:[102]

The General-Field-Marshal Prince Potemkin of Taurida invites you to render him the honour of coming on Monday, 28th April at six o'clock to his palace on Horse-Guards to the masquerade which will be favoured by the presence of Her Imperial Majesty and Their Imperial Highnesses.⁴³

CARNIVAL AND CRISIS

That Marshal Prince Potemkin gave us a superb party yesterday at which I stayed from seven in the evening until two in the morning when I went home ... Now I am writing to you to improve my headache.

Catherine II to Baron Grimm

At 7 p.m. on 28 April 1791, the imperial coach arrived before the Classical colonnade of the Prince's palace on Horse-Guards, which was illuminated with hundreds of torches. The Empress, wearing a full-length long-sleeved Russian dress with a rich diadem, dismounted slowly in the rain. Potemkin stepped forward to greet her. He wore a scarlet tailcoat and, tossed over his shoulders, a gold and black lace cloak, ornamented with diamonds. He was covered with 'as many diamonds as a man could possibly wear'.¹ Behind him, an adjutant held a pillow that bore his hat, which was so weighed down with diamonds that it could barely be worn. Potemkin moved towards her through two lines of footmen, wearing their master's livery of pale-yellow with blue and silver. Each bore a candelabrum. Bathed in this imperial effulgence, Potemkin knelt on one knee before Catherine. She brought him to his feet. He took her hand.

There was a dull roar as 5,000 members of the public, more interested in eating than in observing history, rushed forward to feast on tables of free food and drink. There were swings, roundabouts and even shops where people were given costumes, but now they wanted the food. The Prince had ordered that it should be laid out after the Empress had entered. But a steward mistook a courtier's carriage and started the feast too early. There was almost a riot. For a second, Catherine, nervous of the people as the French Revolution dismantled the Bourbon monarchy, thought 'the honourable public' were stampeding. She was relieved to see they were simply filling their pockets with food to take home.¹

The Prince led his Empress towards the door of the Palace, later named the Taurida, which set a new standard for Classical simplicity and grandeur. 'All was gigantic.' That was its clear message: the facade was plain and colossal, designed by the architect Ivan Starov to symbolize Potemkin's power and splendour. Two long wings led out from a domed portico supported by six Doric columns. Inside, the couple entered an anteroom and walked along a receiving line that led into the Cupola or Colonnade Hall, where the Grand Duke Paul and his wife along with 3,000 guests awaited Catherine in their costumes.

'Imagine it if you can!', Catherine dared Grimm. The Hall was the biggest in Europe -21 metres high, its oval shape was 74.5 metres long and 14.9 metres wide, supported by two rows of thirty-six Ionic columns - the 'poetry of columns' that dwarfed the thousands of guests. (It could easily hold 5,000 people.) The floors were inlaid with precious woods and decorated with 'astonishingly huge' white marble vases, the ceilings hung with multi-tiered chandeliers of black crystal - treasures bought from the Duchess of Kingston. At each end was a double row of French windows.³ The entire Hall was so bright it almost appeared to be on fire, illuminated by the massive chandeliers and fifty-six smaller ones each with sixteen candles. Five thousand torches burned. The wind orchestra of 300 musicians and an organ, accompanied by choirs - all hidden in the two galleries - burst into a concert of specially written choral pieces.

Straight ahead of her, the Empress could not miss the famous Winter Garden. This too was the biggest in Europe, for it was the same size again as the rest of a palace that covered 650,700 square feet. The huge glass hall was supported by columns in the form of palm-trees which contained warm water pipes. This was William Gould's chef d'oeuvre - an organized jungle of exotic plants, 'flowers, hyacinths and narcissuses, myrtles, orange trees in plenty' - where the walls were all mirrors that concealed more immense stoves.[103] Lamps and diamonds were hidden in mock bunches of grapes, clusters of pears and pineapples so that everything seemed alight. Silver and scarlet fishes swam in glass globes. The cupola was painted like the sky. Paths and little hillocks crisscrossed this arbour, leading to statues of goddesses. Its most striking effect was its 'infinite perspective', for Catherine could see straight through the brightness of the Colonnade Hall into the tropical lightness of the Winter Garden and, further, through its glass walls into the English Garden outside, where its 'sanded paths wind, hills rise up, valleys fall away, cuttings open groves, ponds sparkle',⁴ its follies and hills, still snow-covered, rolling all the way down to the Neva. The tropical forest and the snowy hills - which was real?

In the midst of the Winter Garden stood a temple to the Empress on a diamond-studded pyramid. At the feet of Shubin's statue of Catherine the Legislatrix, a placard from Potemkin read: 'To the Mother of the Motherland and my benefactress'.⁵ The Prince escorted Catherine to the left of the Col­onnade Hall on to a raised dais, covered in Persian carpets, facing the garden. Out of the tropical gardens came two quadrilles, each of twenty-four children, 'the most beautiful in St Petersburg' according to Catherine, dressed in costumes of sky blue and pink, and covered from head to foot in 'all the jewels of the town and suburbs' - the boys in Spanish garb, the girls in Greek. Grand Duke Alexander, the future Emperor and vanquisher of Napoleon, danced a complicated ballet in the first quadrille, choreographed by Le Picq, the celebrated dancemaster. Grand Duke Constantine danced in the second. 'It's impossible', wrote Catherine afterwards, 'to see anything more gorgeous, more varied or more brilliant'. Then Le Picq himself danced a solo.

As darkness fell, Potemkin conducted the imperial family, followed by the entire party, into the Gobelins Room, where the tapestries told the story of Esther. In the midst of sofas and chairs stood a Potemkinian wonder: a life- sized gold elephant, covered in emeralds and rubies, with a clock concealed in its base, ridden by a blackamoor mahout in Persian silks who gave a signal at which curtains were raised to reveal a stage and amphitheatre with boxes. Two French comedies and a ballet were followed by a procession of all the peoples of the Empire, including captured Ottoman pashas from Ismail, in the Asiatic splendour of their national dress. While guests watched the show, servants in the other halls were lighting a further 140,000 lamps and 20,000 wax candles. When the Empress returned, the Colonnade Hall was bathed in a blaze of light.

The Prince took Catherine by the hand to the Winter Garden. When they stood before the statue in the temple, he again fell to his knees and thanked the Empress. She raised him to his feet and kissed him tenderly on the forehead: she thanked him for his deeds and devotion. Derzhavin's 'Ode' to Potemkin's victories was recited: 'Thunder of victory, ring! Brave Rus, rejoice!'⁶

Potemkin signalled the orchestra. The ball began at last. Catherine played cards with her daughter-in-law in the Gobelins Room, then went to rest. Just as he had apartments in her palaces, so Catherine had a bedroom in his. Their rooms here showed their cosy intimacy together. Both loved monumental palaces and tiny bedrooms: her bedroom was in Potemkin's wing and its ceiling was decorated with Classical symbols of voluptuousness, goats and shepherds. There was a secret door, concealed behind a rug hung on the wall, into Potemkin's anteroom, bedroom and study, so that they could enter each other's rooms. His bedroom was simple, snug and light, with walls of plain silk.[104] (Sometimes, when he was in residence, she is said to have stayed; she certainly held dinners there.)⁷

At midnight, Catherine returned for the supper in such high spirits that the forty-eight children returned to dance their quadrilles all over again. The Empress's table, placed where the orchestra in the amphitheatre had played, was covered in gold. Forty-eight magnates sat down around her. Fourteen tables surrounded hers. There were other tables and buffets in different halls. Each was illuminated by a ball of white and blue glass. On one table, a huge silver goblet stood between two more of the Duchess of Kingston's gargantuan vases. While waiters in Potemkin's livery served, the Prince stood behind the Empress's chair, looming over her like a diamond-glinting Cyclops, and served her himself until she insisted he sit down and join her. After dinner, there were more concerts and the ball began again. At 2 a.m., four hours after she usually left balls, the Empress rose to leave. The Prince of Taurida led her out as he had led her in.

In the vestibule, Serenissimus fell to his knees - the ritual submission of this scarlet-coated giant before his empress, in front of the great of the Empire and the cabinets of Europe. He had had her bedroom prepared if she wished to stay. It was unlikely, but he wanted to be able to offer it. She was too tired to stay any longer. The orchestra was primed with two different airs - one if the Empress stayed, and one if she left. If she was leaving, Potemkin had arranged to put his hand on his heart, and, when he did, the orchestra burst into the melancholic bars of a lover's lament, written, long before, by the Prince himself. 'The only thing that matters in the world', went the cantata, 'is you.' The magnificence of the ball, the sadness of the song and the sight of this unwieldy one-eyed giant on his knees touched Catherine. The partners felt old and had loved each other for a very long time. Both of them burst into tears. He kissed her hand again and again, and they sobbed together before she climbed into her carriage and drove away.⁸

This looked like a parting. It is often interpreted as a premonition of Potemkin's death. So much of this last stay in St Petersburg is distorted by hindsight.[105] But it was a most emotional night, the climax of their adventure together. Potemkin lingered among the debris of the party, touched by mel­ancholy and nostalgia, almost in a trance.

When he came to say goodbye to one lady who knew him well - Countess Natalia Zakrevskaya - she noticed his air of sadness. Her heart went out to him. She knew him well enough to say: 'I don't know what will become of you. You are younger than the Sovereign. You'll outlive her: what will become of you then? You would never agree to be the second man.' Potemkin contemplated this dreamily: 'Don't worry. I'll die before the Sovereign. I'll die soon.' She never saw him again.⁹

'That fete was magnificent,' wrote Stedingk, who was there, 'and no other man could have given it.'¹⁰ But it had been irresponsibly extravagant - Potemkin supposedly spent between 150,000 and 500,000 roubles during those three months. Everyone knew that the Treasury was paying for the ball as it paid all his bills, but it was soon widely believed that, as Stedingk reported, 'this prodigality displeases the Empress'.

Catherine was so overexcited when she got home that night that she could not sleep. She got over her 'little headache' by writing to Grimm to rave about the 'fete superbe' with the enthusiasm of a young girl the morning after her debut. She even drew a map to show Grimm where she sat and told him how late she stayed: so much for her disapproval! Then she 'spun' Grimm the political purpose of what was clearly a joint Catherine-Potemkin production: 'There you are, Monsieur, that is how, in the midst of trouble and war and the menaces of dictators [she meant Frederick William of Prussia], we conduct ourselves in Petersburg.' There is no evidence that she grumbled about Pot­emkin's expenditure, colossal and excessive though it was, but she probably did. Like all of us, she may well have got a shock when she received the bill.

Just as she was writing to Grimm, a letter arrived bringing dramatic Polish news that meant that Potemkin would have to stay in Petersburg much longer.

On 22 April/3 May 1791, the Commonwealth of Poland and Lithuania had adopted a new constitution amid tumultuous scenes in the Sejm: one deputy even drew his sword in mid-debate and threatened to kill his son like Abraham and Isaac. Poland's 'May the Third' Revolution created a hereditary monarchy, in which the succession was to be offered to the Elector of Saxony or his daugh­ter, with a strong executive, almost combining the powers of the English Crown and American presidency, and an army. Warsaw celebrated with the slogan 'The King with the Nation'. Those who had thought Poland was beyond help were impressed. 'Happy people,' wrote Burke, 'happy prince.'

The timing was useful for the Russians but unfortunate for the Poles, because the Anglo-Prussian coalition was about to free Russia's hands to deal with their awkward and recalcitrant satellite. Catherine shared Potemkin's disgust for the French Revolution: Republicanism was 'a sickness of the mind' she declared, and she was already cracking down on radical ideas in Russia itself. The Polish Revolution was actually politically conservative, strength­ening, not weakening, the monarchy, decreasing, not increasing, the franchise. But Catherine chose to regard it as a Jacobin extension of the French Revo­lution into her sphere of influence: 'We're perfectly prepared,' Catherine signed off ominously to Grimm, 'and unfortunately, we don't yield to the very devil himself!'¹¹

Potemkin, who was receiving almost daily reports from Bulgakov, Branicki and spies in Warsaw, was watching Poland closely too. He did not like what he saw¹² and resolved to take supreme control of Polish policy and put his secret plans into action. He had not yet succeeded in budging Zubov but he probably felt that an Ottoman peace and a Polish success would overpower his critics. So he stayed much longer than he had agreed with Catherine, to discuss Poland, which severely strained their partnership. But, before they could turn on Poland, they had to fight the Turks to a settlement and negotiate their way out of the Ochakov Crisis with Pitt's emissary, Fawkener, who was about to arrive.

'If you want to take the stone from my heart, if you want to calm the spasms,' Catherine told Potemkin in early May, 'then send couriers to the armies quickly and let land and sea forces start operations ...' - otherwise they would never get the peace both wanted.¹³ The Prince, in one of his moods of euphoric creativity, fired off orders to his forces while founding new settlements across the south. On n May, he ordered Admiral Ushakov to put to sea and pursue the enemy; Repnin, commanding the main army in his absence, to strike decisively across the Danube to destroy any concentration of Turkish forces; and Gudovich, commanding the Kuban corps, to take the strongest Ottoman fortress in those parts - Anapa.¹⁴ Meanwhile the partners worked out their Polish plans.

On 16 May, when the Anglo-Prussian crisis was still unsettled. Catherine signed her first rescript to Potemkin on Poland. The Prince could intervene only if the Prussians moved into Poland, in which case Potemkin could offer the Poles the Ottoman principality of Moldavia in return for reversing their Revo­lution. If they did not take this bait, Potemkin could resort to 'extreme measures' in the traditional way, by arranging a confederation under his Polish allies, Branicki and Potocki. Catherine specifically added that among the 'extreme measures' she approved 'your secret plan' of raising the Orthodox in Kiev, Podolia and Bratslav, under the banner of the 'Grand Hetman' of the Cos­sacks.¹⁵ It is usually claimed that Potemkin did not receive the powers he wanted.¹⁶ On the contrary, his powers were potentially vast, though conditional on the real if diminishing likelihood of Prussia and England attacking Russia. (Negotiations with Fawkener had not yet started.)[106] Besides, Potemkin did not 'receive' the rescripts like a schoolboy from a headmistress: the couple worked on them together, correcting one another's drafts, as they always had. The rescripts and correspondence show that Catherine agreed with Potemkin's Cossack and Moldavian schemes, and had done so for more than two years.

Potemkin's Polish schemes are the mystery of his last year: he was weaving a tapestry of overlapping threads that no one has ever managed to untwine. His plans appear protean, shifting and exotic, but the Prince never saw the need to decide on a plan until the last moment. Meanwhile, he would run all of them simultaneously. He had been contemplating the Polish question since he came to power and his Polish policies existed on many different levels, but it is impossible to divorce them from his need for a principality outside

Russian borders. All these plans contain slots for Potemkin's own realm. He had convinced himself that his 'independent' Polish duchy, built around his Smila estates, would be a camouflaged means for Russia to win swathes of central Europe without having to repay the other powers with a second partition of Poland.

There were four Potemkinian projects. There was annexation of Moldavia by Poland. This duchy would have fitted well into the Poland envisaged by his ally, Felix Potocki, in a letter to Potemkin that May: a federal republic of semi-independent hetmanates. Simultaneously, there was the plan for a confederation, led by Branicki and Potocki, that would overthrow the new Constitution and replace it with the old version or a new federal one with Moldavia as a bribe. Even as early as February, Potemkin had been flattering Potocki, inviting him to a meeting 'on the veritable well-being of our common country'.¹⁷

Then there was Potemkin's idea of invading Poland as grand hetman of the Black Sea Cossacks to liberate the Orthodox of eastern Poland. This combined his Polish ancestry, his regal ambitions, his enjoyment of drama, his Russian instinct to break the Polish Revolution - and his 'passion for Cossacks'.¹⁸ Even before procuring the Hetmanate, Potemkin had envisaged a special Polish role for Black Sea Cossacks, recruiting them in Poland.¹⁹ On 6 July 1787, for example, Catherine let him establish four such squadrons from his own Polish villages,¹⁰ where he already had his own forces: Smila's mounted and infantry militia.²¹ Later, Alexandra Branicka explained that he 'wanted to unite the Cossacks with the Polish army and declare himself king of Poland'.²¹

This now seems the most unlikely of his plans but actually it was feasible. The Orthodox provinces of Podolia and eastern Poland, led by magnates like Felix Potocki and his old-fashioned vision of Polish freedom, were a long way from the sophisticated, Catholic Patriots who dominated the Four-Year Sejm in Warsaw with their new-fangled French concept of liberty (and who hated Potemkin). The mistake is to see this Cossack eruption in isolation: both Catherine and Potemkin clearly saw it as a way to mobilize the Orthodox population to break the power of the Revolution in Warsaw while possibly getting Serenissimus his own realm within a federated Poland, dominated by Russia.

The fourth possibility was the second partition of Poland: Potemkin was never shy about discussing a new partition and often dangled it in front of Prussian envoys; despite the views of nationalistic Polish historians, however, it was his last option. He might have made Poland cede Thorn and Danzig in April to avoid war on two more fronts in April, but that moment had passed. This proudly reborn scion of the szlachta understood that partition destroyed his ancient homeland - 'оиг country' - and it also scuppered his personal base outside Russia. Strategically, it benefited Prussia more than any other state, bringing the Hohenzollerns nearer to Russia. He favoured the Petrine 474 ^the last dance

policy of keeping an independent Poland as a crippled and eccentric buffer- zone. Far from wanting partition, most of Potemkin's plans, such as the Moldavian option, involved enlarging Poland, not diminishing her. If he had lived longer, he might have succeeded and helped prevent partition. If Catherine had predeceased him, it is likely he would have moved to become a Polish magnate.

Potemkin stayed in Petersburg to hammer out a Polish policy, while the stories of his sinister plans circulated in febrile revolutionary Warsaw. The Polish envoy Deboli stepped up the tension by sending Stanislas-Augustus every rumour of Potemkin's royal ambitions. As his enemies united at Court to depose him at last, the scene was set for the bitterest crisis of his long friendship with Catherine.

'We were running things all right without you, weren't we?', Catherine replied to Potemkin, according to the hostile Deboli. The words ring true, though the tone is that of a wife wryly scolding her husband, not divorcing him.²³ William Fawkener, Pitt's special envoy, had arrived on 14 May, but the protracted negotiations to settle the Ochakov Crisis only really started in early June, when Catherine and Potemkin held long conversations with him. In his unpublished despatches, Fawkener observed their different styles but united message: during one audience with the Englishman, Catherine was just praising Potemkin's surprisingly good mood when she was interrupted by one of her greyhounds barking outside at a child. She reassured the little boy and, turning pointedly to Fawkener, added: 'Dogs that bark don't always bite.'²⁴

Potemkin, on the other hand, invited the cowed British bulldog to dinner, where the Englishman was utterly overwhelmed by the Prince's ebullient and entertaining soliloquy - 'strange and full of inconsistency'. Serenissimus 'told me he was Russian and loved his country but he loved England too; that I was an islander and consequently selfish and loved my island only'. He made a Potemkinian offer: why did not Britain have Crete (Candia) in the Mediterranean as its prize from the Ottoman bonanza? This pied-a-terre would give Britain control of Egyptian-Levantine trade. And then he went into raptures about his southern lands, the soil, the people, the fleet - 'great projects' whose success depended 'solely on him'. At the end of this per­formance, the bewildered Fawkener admitted to London that he had not had an opportunity of getting a single word in edgeways, but it left Pitt in no doubt about the seriousness of Russia's commitment to the Black Sea and its refusal to compromise over Ochakov.²⁵ By early July, England and Prussia realized they would simply have to buckle to Catherine's demands.

Fawkener was further humiliated by the arrival in Petersburg of Robert Adair, sent mischievously (and possibly treasonably) by Charles James Fox as the opposition's unofficial envoy. Simon Vorontsov ensured Adair, aged twenty-eight, a good reception by telling Potemkin that even Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, the queen of the ton, 'honours him with her friend­ship'.²⁶ Adair received a 'great welcome' from Empress and Prince. Before he left, Potemkin gave him a present in Catherine's name - a ring with her portrait.²⁷

The Prince, at the height of his dignity, now resembled a noble bear baited by a pack of dogs. Zubov played on Catherine's almost subliminal unease about Potemkin's domineering behaviour by implying that he was becoming a possible threat to her. 'Some secret suspicion hid in the Empress's heart against this Field-Marshal,'²⁸ recalled Gavrili Romanovich Derzhavin, the neo-Classical poet and civil servant. Serenissimus muttered that she was surrounded by his enemies. When Catherine was at Tsarskoe Selo for the summer, Potemkin paid fewer visits than usual and did not stay long. As an agreement with the Anglo-Prussians got closer and the Polish Question more urgent, ambassadors noticed that Catherine seemed to treat him coolly. As so often before, this coolness gave hope to Potemkin's enemies.

Zubov was not just undermining the Prince with Catherine: first he managed to turn Suvorov²⁹ against his former patron by offering favours that Potemkin had already recommended. So Suvorov fell out with Potemkin not because of the latter's jealousy but due to the former's misguided intriguing. Then Zubov told Derzhavin 'in the Empress's name' not to go to Potemkin for favours: Zubov would provide whatever he wanted.

Derzhavin had made his name with an 'Ode to Princess Felitsa', which teasingly described the Procurator-General Viazemsky as 'choleric' and Pot­emkin as 'indolent', yet the Prince protected him against Viazemsky and other enemies over the years.³⁰ Derzhavin repaid Potemkin's decency with petty betrayal - and poignant poetry. (His masterpiece, The Waterfall, which inspired Pushkin, was a posthumous tribute to Potemkin.)³¹ Zubov offered Derzhavin the post of secretary to the Empress. The poet accepted the job and moderated praise of Potemkin in his poems.

When he delivered one of these. Potemkin stormed out of his bedroom, ordered his carriage and rode off 'God knows where' into a tempest of thunder and lightning outside. Derzhavin called meekly a few days later and Potemkin, who would have known exactly how Zubov had turned his protege, received the poet coolly but without rancour.³²

The Prince always behaved manically at times of political tension. He chewed his nails and pursued love affairs with priapic enthusiasm. Derzhavin and foreigners like Deboli claimed he had gone mad - hinting that he suffered from the insanity of tertiary syphilis, for which there is no evidence. One night, Deboli claimed, Potemkin turned up drunk at a Countess Pushkina's house and caressed her hair. She threatened to throw him out and he drawled that he had not given up the idea of being king of Poland.³³ This is an unlikely story. Besides even his enemies admitted that his seductions had never been more successful. 'Women crave the attentions of Prince Potemkin', observed his critic, Count Fyodor Rostopchin, 'like men crave medals.'³⁴ Serenissimus gave a three-day fete in one of his houses near Tsarskoe Selo while 'the town talk is engrossed', Fawkener reported breathlessly to London, 'by his quarrel with one woman, his apparent inclination for another, [and] his real attach­ment to a third'.³⁵

The trap seemed to be closing on Potemkin. Most histories claim that, when the Prince finally left St Petersburg in late July, he had been ruined by Zubov, rejected by Catherine and defeated by his enemies, and was dying from a broken heart. This could hardly be further from the truth.

In July when the Count was at Peterhof, Zubov thought he had planted enough suspicion in Catherine's mind for his creeping coup to achieve its goal.³⁶ But who was to replace Potemkin? There was no one else of his military or political stature - with one exception. On 24 June, Count Alexei Orlov-Ches­mensky mysteriously arrived. His visits to the capital since 1774 always coin­cided with attempts to overthrow Potemkin: he liked to boast that, when he came in the door, Potemkin left by the window.³⁷ But when Orlov-Chesmensky called at Tsarskoe Selo, Catherine let Potemkin know in a note - hardly the behaviour of a empress about to overthrow him.³⁸ During June and July, Pot­emkin, in town, wrote to Catherine, in Tsarskoe Selo, about his agonizing hang­nail. She was concerned enough to write back, signing her notes 'Adieu Papa'. She enclosed the usual sycophantic letter from Zubov. Potemkin also sent her a dress as a present.³⁹ Even Deboli reported that Catherine emphatically ordered Orlov-Chesmensky not to attack 'her great friend'.⁴⁰

Furthermore Potemkin's influence had not disappeared. When Fawkener finally suggested that England would agree to Russian terms, Potemkin simply accepted the deal himself, without even checking with Catherine. Deboli noted that this irritated Russian ministers - but it hardly suggests that he had lost his power.⁴¹ Then Potemkin delivered a series of victories: on 19 June, he announced that Kutuzov had followed his precise orders to strike at Badadag- and had defeated 20,000 Turks. On 22 June, Gudovich stormed the fortress of Anapa, where - as a bonus - he captured the Chechen hero, Sheikh Mansour who had sought refuge there.[107] 'This is the key that has opened the door for the big blows,' Potemkin declared to Catherine on 2 July. 'You'll be pleased to see how they will roar in Asia!' That day, maybe to reconcile with Potemkin, the Empress, accompanied by two Zubovs, came into Petersburg from Peterhof to dine with the Prince at the Taurida Palace, where she toasted her consort. So much for the imminent fall of Potemkin.⁴²

On 11 July, the Ochakov Crisis ended: the British and Prussians signed the compromise that allowed Catherine to keep Ochakov and the land between the Bug and Dniester - provided that the Turks made peace immediately. If they did not, Russia was free to fight for better terms. That very day, a courier arrived to announce that Repnin, following Potemkin's order to strike across the Danube at enemy concentrations, had won a splendid victory at Manchin on 28 June, destroying the Grand Vizier's army of 80,000 and preventing the two Turkish armies from combining. Thank you for the good news, my friend,' Catherine wrote to Potemkin. 'Two holidays in one, my friend, and other wonderful events besides. I'll come to the city to celebrate tomorrow.' The 'Те Deums' were sung before the Empress at the Kazan Cathedral. Catherine threw dinners and balls, attended by the Prince, for Fawkener.⁴³

Warsaw and Petersburg now awaited Potemkin's reaction to the May the Third Constitution. The Prince, like a giant if rusty howitzer, was turning slowly towards Poland, but what were his plans? Intrigues and plans swirled around him. Deboli was convinced that Potemkin planned to be king of Poland by creating a 'civil war', meaning either the Confederation or the Cossack invasion.⁴⁴ Branicki in Warsaw swaggered from planning his Con­federation to patriotic suggestions to increase the size of Poland. Alexandra Branicka wanted Potemkin to be Stanislas-Augustus' heir.⁴⁵ Warsaw had been awash for years with pamphlets warning that Potemkin would make Alexandra's children heirs to the throne.⁴⁶ There were comical interludes amid the menace. The Prince could not resist teasing the Polish envoy, Deboli, at a party, saying that the Poles liked the Sublime Porte so much they even wore Turkish pantaloons. Deboli was offended by this trouser insult, 'so I responded that we did not need other people's pantaloons because we had our own'.⁴⁷

Potemkin was torn. His duty was to gallop south and negotiate peace with the Turks, but his instinct was to stay in Petersburg, where he remained exposed to Zubov, until he and Catherine had thrashed out what to do about Poland. This once again raised the tension between these two hypersensitive connoisseurs of power, who now became unhappy with each other, ruled by 'little mutual jealousies'.⁴⁸ Catherine wanted him to focus on the peace.

When the row blew up, it was about women as well: was she still jealous of Potemkin even though she loved her Blackie or was she simply weary of his parade of debauchery? Potemkin suggested that the feckless Prince Mikhail Golitsyn be appointed one of the new army inspectors, created to wipe out abuses in the military. 'He won't bring credit upon you in the Army,' replied Catherine, but she was most irritated about Golitsyn's wife. Everyone in Petersburg now knew that Potemkin, bored of the Beautiful Greek, was infatuated by Princess Praskovia Andreevna Golitsyna (nee Shuvalova), the literary but 'restless' girl who became the Prince's 'last passion'.⁴⁹ Catherine told him: 'Let me say that his wife's face, however nice it may be, is not worth the cost of burdening yourself with such a man ... his wife may be charming but there's absolutely nothing to gain by courting her.' Indeed Praskovia's family were protecting her virtue, so Potemkin might well end up with the husband without even getting the wife. Catherine pulled no punches. Both Golitsyns were deceiving him. 'My friend, I am used to telling you the truth. You should also tell it to me.' She begged him to go south and 'conclude peace and after that you'll come back here and amuse yourself as much as you wish ... As for this letter, do tear it to pieces after reading it.'⁵⁰ But the Prince kept the most biting letter Catherine ever wrote to him.[108]

Her paroxysm of anger was, as so often, the letting-off of steam at the end of their argument. She had just signed her second secret rescript to Potemkin of 18 July that settled their debate and meant he could immediately leave for the south. Russian, Polish and Western historians have argued about its meaning for 200 years. Most of the confusion is caused by the problem of reconciling the extraordinary powers it granted Potemkin with the conviction that he was falling from power. The legend claims that the Prince was a broken man, haemorrhaging power, who 'could not bear the thought of disgrace' when 'he learned that Platon Zubov seemed to have absolute power over the Empress's mind'. This is what foreigners were told when they visited Petersburg in the Zubov ascendancy after Potemkin's death.⁵¹ Since it has been accepted that Catherine and Zubov were about to remove him, how could she be giving him vast powers to make peace or war with Turks and Poles? Therefore, they argued, Catherine must have signed a sham just to get rid of him. This was based on hindsight, not on reality.⁵²

Not one contemporary in 1791 believed he was about to be dismissed. Though all of them knew that there had been rows, even the hostile foreigners Deboli and British envoy Whitworth reported that Serenissimus was increas­ing his power, not losing it: 'such is the confidence reposed in him', Whitworth told Grenville, 'he is left in full liberty' to make war or peace with the Turks.⁵³ As for Zubov's intrigues, 'there is no probability of their succeeding so unaccountable is the predilection of the Empress for him'.⁵⁴ Long afterwards, Zubov himself admitted he had 'won a semi-victory', by surviving Potemkin's attempts to dislodge him, but 'I could not remove him from my path; and it was essential to remove him because the Empress always met his wishes halfway and simply feared him as though he were an exacting husband. She loved only me but she often pointed to Potemkin as an example for me to follow.' Zubov then revealed his true interest in the Empress's love: 'It is his fault I am not twice as rich as I am.'⁵⁵

Once one realizes that he was not about to be dismissed at all, it is clear the rescript was a triumph for Potemkin that more than compensated for his failure to dislodge Zubov. Once peace with the Porte was signed, Potemkin was granted massive powers to make war in Poland, to pursue his plans and even to decide the form of the Polish constitution. The Prince could negotiate with Potocki on the details, though it was vital that the Poles be seen to invite the Russians, not vice versa. But 'our own interests demand that it be carried out as soon as possible so that the evil ... will not take root'.⁵⁶ The rescript implies that Potemkin had persuaded the Empress that his plans could achieve a submissive neighbour without partition. But Catherine made clear that, if the Prince's schemes failed, partition was the only alternative.

On his last night in Petersburg, Serenissimus dined at his niece Tatiana's along with Countess Golovina, who thought him a most disreputable man. But this time he moved her. He told her again and again that he would never forget her. He was sure he was going to die soon.⁵⁷

At 4 a.m. on 24 July 1791, Potemkin set off from Tsarskoe Selo. As the Prince was galloping south at breakneck speed, the Empress sent a note after him filled with the loving warmth of their old friendship: 'Goodbye my friend, I kiss you.'⁵⁸ They never met again.

THE LAST RIDE

His niece wanted to know... 'What news do you bring?' 'I bring you great sorrow Put on black Your uncle has died

Lying on a coat in the midst of the steppes.'

Soldiers' marching song, 'The Death of Potemkin'

The ringing of bells, the firing of cannons and the cloud of dust raised by his carriages marked Potemkin's arrival in Mogilev on his way south. Civil servants and nobles from distant corners of the province, and the ladies in their best clothes, waited at the Governor's house.

When his carriage pulled up, the crowd rushed to the bottom of the steps: the Prince of Taurida emerged in a flowing summer dressing gown, covered in dust, and strode through the crowd without glancing at anyone. At dinner that night, Serenissimus invited a noble Polish Patriot, Michel Oginski, to join his entourage and cheerfully treated him to a virtuoso performance, discussing Holland, 'which he knew as if he'd lived his whole life there; England, of which the Government, customs and morals were perfectly known to him', and then music and painting, 'adding that the English knew nothing of either'. When they talked about the art of war, the Prince declared the key to victory was breaking the rules, but studying strategy was not enough: 'You've got to be born with it.'¹ This was hardly the reception of a fallen politician and scarcely the behaviour of a broken one.

As Potemkin approached Moldavia, Prince Repnin was already negotiating with the Grand Vizier in Galatz. Potemkin cheerfully told Catherine that preliminaries had been agreed on 24 July, but on the 31st, when he was only one day away, Repnin signed a truce. Potemkin was said to be furious with jealousy that Repnin had stolen his thunder. But Repnin's reports show that Potemkin was perfectly happy for him to negotiate the preliminaries, though not necessarily sign them. Potemkin's rage was political and personal - but hardly based on jealousy. Repnin, whom Catherine called 'worse than an old woman', was the late Panin's nephew, a Freemason of the Martinist sect and part of Paul's Prussophile Court, yet he had become Potemkin's submissive workhorse. 'The Bible unites them,' Ligne explained - the Martinism of one and the superstition of the other 'fit together marvellously'.² No more. Repnin's trick was surely encouraged by letters from the capital, claiming that Zubov would protect him from Potemkin's fury. 'You little Martinist,' Potemkin shouted in one version. 'How dare you!'³

Repnin had signed the wrong deal at the wrong time: ignorant of the latest agreement with Fawkener, he had agreed an eight-month armistice, which allowed the Turks an ample breather to rebuild their forces, and a Turkish demand that Russia should not fortify ceded territory. Nor did Repnin realize Potemkin was waiting for news of Ushakov and the fleet: if they succeeded, the terms could be raised. It just happened that Ushakov had defeated the Ottoman Fleet on the very day Repnin had signed the terms; Constantinople was in panic. Catherine too was over the moon when Potemkin informed her about the peace, but both she and Bezborodko immediately denounced Repnin's clumsy mistakes. When Catherine learned of Ushakov's triumph, she was angry.⁴ Potemkin could have used Ushakov's victory to force the Turks to fight again and therefore free Russia from the Fawkener deal.⁵ This was still possible, but Repnin's concessions made it harder.

Serenissimus rushed down to Nikolaev to inspect his new battleships and Palace and almost flew the 500 versts back to Jassy in thirty hours. He then fell ill, as he often did after months of nervous tension, debilitating debauchery, overwork and exhausting travel. There was plague in Constantinople and an epidemic of fevers across the south. 'I've never seen anything like it,' he told Catherine, who was fretting over his health like old times.⁶ Jassy was riddled with 'putrid marsh miasma'.⁷ Everyone was falling ill.

Granz Vizier Yusuf-Pasha collected yet another Ottoman army of 150,000 over the Danube. His envoy began the negotiations by testing Potemkin's resolve, asking if there was any chance of keeping the Dniester. The Prince broke off talks. The Vizier apologized and offered to execute his own envoy. Potemkin demanded independence for Moldavia, Russian approval for the appointment of the Hospodars of Wallachia, and the cession of Anapa.⁸ He was raising the stakes, daring the Turks to fight again and free him from Fawkener's deal. Then came an ominous omen.

On 13 August 1791, one of his officers, Prince Karl Alexander of Wiirt- temberg, Grand Duke Paul's brother-in-law, died of the fever. Potemkin, who had become friendly with Paul's wife, laid on an elaborate royal funeral for her brother. The Prince, already haunted by premonitions of death, was fighting his own sickness. He followed the cortege for miles on foot in the stifling heat and took two glasses of iced water at the burial site. As the hearse passed him in the midst of the funeral, the delirious Potemkin thought it was his carriage and tried to climb into it. For a superstitious man, this was the tolling of the bell. 'God is my witness, I am tormented.' He collapsed and was borne out of Galatz, ordering Repnin to evacuate the army from the unhealthy town.⁹

Potemkin rested in nearby Gusha, where Popov finally persuaded him to take his medicine, probably cinchona, the South American bark, an early form of quinine. He recovered enough to appoint Samoilov, Ribas and Lazhkarev as Russian plenipotentiaries - but Catherine sensed that she could lose her indispensable consort: 'I pray to God that He turns away this misfortune from you and saves me from such a blow,' she wrote to him. She wept for several days. On 29 August, she even prayed for Potemkin's life at the night service at the Nevsky Monastery, to which she donated gold and diamonds. Alexandra Branicka was summoned to attend her uncle. But ten days later: 'I am better,' Potemkin told Catherine, 'I did not hope ever to see you again, dear Matushka.'¹⁰ He headed back to Jassy - but he could not shake off the fever.

'I don't understand how you can move about from one place to another, in such a state of weakness,' Catherine wrote, adding that Zubov was 'very worried and for one day he didn't know how to ease my sorrow.' Even a sick Potemkin must have rolled his eye at that, but until his last days he always sent his regards to the 'tooth' he had failed to extract. For four days, he suffered more fevers and headaches, which improved on 10 September. 'I am in God's power,' Potemkin told the Empress, 'but your business will not suffer until the last minute.'¹¹

This was true: he supervised the peace talks, sent the Vizier presents,¹² positioned the army in case the war broke out again and reported that the fleet had returned to Sebastopol. Nor did he cease Polish intrigues. He secretly summoned his Polish allies, General of the Polish Artillery Felix Potocki and Field-Hetman of the Polish crown Seweryn Rzewuski: 'I have the honour to propose a personal interview,' at which he would make known the Empress's 'sincere intentions' and 'specific dispositions'.¹³ They set off at once. Through­out the summer, he never neglected his colonization, his shipbuilding or his own entertainment.¹⁴ He wanted harmonious music and vibrant company, writing on 27 August to the French politician and historian Senac de Meilhan, whose thoughts on the French Revolution and Ancient Greece 'are such amiable things that they merit a discussion in person. Come and see me in Moldavia.'

Musically, Potemkin convalesced by writing hymns: 'And now my soul, fearing and hoping in the abyss of its wickedness, seeks help but cannot find it,' went his 'Canon to the Saviour': 'Do give it your hand, Purest Virgin .. .V⁵ But he also was about to hire a new and more accomplished composer. 'I want to send you the first pianist and one of the best composers in Germany,' suggested Andrei Razumovsky, Russian envoy in Vienna, to the Prince. He had already offered the job to the composer, who agreed to come: 'He's not happy with his position here and would be eager to undertake this journey. He's in Bohemia now but is expected back. If Your Highness wishes, I shall hire him for a short time, just to listen to him and keep him for a while.'¹⁶ Potemkin's answer is lost. The composer's name was Mozart.[109]

Potemkin's condition worsened. All the labyrinthine complexities of the Prince's interests were now reduced to the one relationship that had been constant in his life for twenty years. Catherine and Serenissimus wrote simple love letters to each other again as if neither wished to miss an opportunity to express their deep affection. Fever-ridden Jassy was a 'veritable hospital'. Most patients, including Repnin and Faleev, recovered slowly after four days of shivering delirium¹⁷ but Potemkin, attended by Sashenka Branicka and Sophie de Witte, did not.

Catherine wished to follow his illness and supervise his recovery as if he were in her apartments in the Winter Palace, but the couriers took between seven and twelve days, so her caring, frantic letters were always behind events: when she thought the Prince was better, he was really worse. If the initial letter said he was improving, the second would say he was failing fast. On 16 September, the first letter she received 'made me happy because I saw you were better but the second one amplified my anxiety again because I saw you've permanent fever and headaches for four days. I ask God to give you strength ... Goodbye my friend, Christ bless you.'¹⁸

Catherine could not hear enough about him: she ordered Popov to send daily reports and asked Branicka, 'Please, Countess, write to me how he is and do your best that he takes as much care as possible against a relapse which is the worst of all in someone already weakened. And I know how careless he is about his health.' Branicka and Popov assumed control of the sickroom while the three doctors, the Frenchman, Massot, and two Russians, could do little.¹⁹ So we follow the agonizing decline through the letters of the two partners - Catherine ever more concerned by the day and Potemkin ever weaker, until Popov's reports take over.

When Catherine's letters arrived, Potemkin sobbed as he read them. He thought he was improving even though the 'shooting in the ear torments me'. Even as he sank, he worried about the 8,000 ill soldiers. 'Thank God they don't die,' said Potemkin. The Turkish plenipotentiaries would arrive in four days: 'I expect lots of trickery but I'll be on my guard.' Potemkin was moved out of Jassy to a country house.²⁰

The Prince stopped feasting and ate moderately: starving a fever worked and 'His Highness is better every hour.' Potemkin took the opportunity to arrange the route the Russian army should take in withdrawing from Mol­davia, since the passage through Poland was still closed. The negotiations progressed. The world watched carefully: the Austrians had now signed their peace with the Porte at Sistova. The gazettes in Vienna followed the Prince's illness, informed almost daily by couriers. They heard he was better and worse and better. If war came, Potemkin was to command himself, but meanwhile he was demanding some influence over Wallachia and Moldavia. The peace talks would be 'stormy'. The Prince was expected to visit Vienna in the autumn as soon as the peace was signed.

The Prince felt 'tired as a dog' but reassured the Empress via Bezborodko: 'I don't spare myself.'²¹ Three days later, the fever returned with redoubled strength. The Prince shivered and weakened. Branicka spent day and night beside him.[110] He refused to take his quinine. 'We persuade His Highness to take it in the Highest name of Your Imperial Majesty in spite of his strong aversion to it,' reported Popov. Serenissimus begged Bezborodko to find him a 'Chinese robe ... I need it desperately.' Catherine rushed to send it down to him, along with a fur coat. The Prince was still dictating notes to Catherine about sickness in the army on the very day that he wrote pathetically: 'I am right out of energy and I don't know when the end will come.'²²

The Prince was suffering 'incessantly and severely'. By the 25th, the Prince's groaning and weeping were distressing the entourage. Once he realized the fever had taken hold, the Prince seemed to have decided to enjoy his decline. Legend claimed that he 'destroyed himself', and certainly his eating did not help. This feverish 'Sultan' devoured a 'ham, a salted goose and three or four chickens', lubricated with kvass, 'all sorts of wines' and spirits. Sterlet and smoked goose were ordered from Astrakhan and Hamburg. 'He purposely looked for the means to avoid recovering.' When he was soaked with sweat, he poured 'ten bottles of eau-de-Cologne over his head'. He was to die as eccentrically as he had lived.²³ He was too ill to care any more.

Potemkin talked 'hopelessly about life', Popov wrote sorrowfully to Cath­erine, 'and said goodbye to all, without listening to our reassurances.' The Prince was attended by Bishop Ambrosius and Metropolitan Iona, a Georgian who begged him to eat sensibly and take his medicine. 'I'll scarcely recover,' replied Potemkin. 'But God will decide.' Then he turned to Ambrosius to discuss the meaning of his life and showed that, for all his Russian super­stitions, he was also a creature of the Enlightenment: 'You, my confessor, you know that I have never wished evil to anybody. To make all men happy was the one thing I wished for.'f When they heard Potemkin's noble confession, the entire chamber burst into sobs. The priests came out and Dr Massot told them the situation was hopeless. 'Deep despair seized us,' wrote the priest, 'but there was nothing we could do.'²⁴

The Prince rallied the next day, 27 September. Nothing made him feel better than a line from the Empress. Her letters arrived with the shaggy fur coat and dressing gown, but they made him think about his past with her and his future. 'Abundant tears always flow from his eyes at every mention of Your Majesty's name.' He managed to write her this note: 'Dear Matushka, life is even harder for me when I don't see you.'²⁵

On 30 September, he turned fifty-two. Everyone tried to comfort him but, whenever he remembered Catherine, he 'wept bitterly' because he would never see her again. That day, thousands of versts to the north, the Empress, reading all Popov's reports, wrote to her 'dear friend': 'I am endlessly worried about your illness. For Christ's sake,' she implored, he must take his medicines. 'And after taking it, I beg you to keep yourself from meals and drinks that ruin the medicine's effect.' She was reacting to Popov's reports from ten days before, but, as her letter was leaving Petersburg, Potemkin woke up finding it difficult to breathe, probably a symptom of pneumonia. The fever returned again and he fainted. On 2 October, he woke up feeling better. They tried to persuade him to take the quinine but he refused. And then, desperate to see the steppes, this eternal bedouin yearned to travel again and feel the wind off the Black Sea. 'His Highness wishes that we take him away from here,' Popov told Catherine, 'but I don't know how we can move him. He's so exhausted.'²⁶ The entourage discussed what to do, while the Prince wrote his last letter to the Empress in his own hand - a simple, courtly expression of devotion to the woman he loved:

Matushka, Most Merciful Lady! In my present condition, so tired by illness, I pray to the Most High to keep your precious health and I throw myself down at your holy feet.

Your Imperial Majesty's most faithful and most grateful subject, Prince Potemkin of Taurida. Oh Matushka, how ill I am!

Then he collapsed, did not recognize anyone and subsided into coma. The doctors struggled to find a pulse for nine hours. His hands and feet were cold as ice.²⁷

In Petersburg, Catherine was just reading the letters of the 25th and 27th - 'life is even harder when I don't see you'. She wept. She even examined the handwriting, trying to find some hope. 'I confess I am desperately worried by them but I see that your last three lines are written a little better,' she wrote in her last letter to her friend. 'And your doctors assure me you are better. I pray to God ...'. She also wrote to Branicka: 'Please stay with him ... Goodbye, dear soul. God bless you.'²⁸

In the afternoon, Potemkin awoke and commanded that they set out. He believed that if he could reach Nikolaev he would recover. He could not sleep that night, but he was calm. The next morning, he kept asking, 'What time is it? Is everything ready?' It was too foggy, but he insisted. They sat him in an armchair and carried him to the six-seater carriage, where they tried to make him comfortable. He dictated his last letter to tell Catherine he was exhausted. Popov brought it to show him and, at the bottom, he managed to scrawl, 'The only escape is to leave.' But he was not strong enough to sign it.

At 8 a.m. accompanied by doctors, Cossacks and niece, his carriage moved off across the open steppe towards the Bessarabian hills.

EPILOGUE

LIFE AFTER DEATH

They trample heroes? - No! - Their deeds Shine through the darkness of the ages. Their graves, like hills in springtime, bloom. Potemkin's work will be inscribed.

Gavrili Derzhavin, The Waterfall

The next day, the body was solemnly returned to Jassy for post-mortem and embalming. The dissection was carried out in his apartments in the Ghika Palace.[111] Slicing open the soft and majestic belly, Dr Massot and his assistants examined the organs and then extracted them one by one, feeding out the entrails like a hose-pipe.¹ They found the innards were very 'wet', awash with bilious fluid. The liver was swollen. The symptoms suggested a 'bilious attack'. There were the inevitable rumours of poisoning, but there was not the slightest evidence. It is most likely that Potemkin was weakened by his fever, whether typhus or malaria, haemorrhoids, drinking and general exhaustion, but these did not necessarily kill him. His earaches, phlegm and difficulties in breathing mean he probably died of bronchial pneumonia. In any case, the stench of the bile was unbearable. Nothing, not even the embalming process, could cleanse it.²

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

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

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

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

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

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

Catherine ordered 'Saint' Mikhail Potemkin to fetch her letters from Jassy and sort out the Prince's labyrinthine finances. But the imperial letters were the holiest relics of Potemkin's legacy. Mikhail Potemkin and Vasily Popov argued over them.¹⁰ The latter insisted on handing them over himself. So Mikhail¹¹ left without them.[112]

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

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

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

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

While the lesser nobility and junior officers, whose wives wore his medallion round their necks, mourned a hero, some of the old noble and military establishment celebrated.²¹ Rostopchin, who thought Zubov 'a twit', was nonetheless 'charmed' that everyone so quickly forgot the 'fall of the Colossus of Rhodes'.²² Grand Duke Paul is supposed to have muttered that the Empire now boasted one less thief - but then Potemkin had kept him from his rightful place for almost twenty years. Zubov, 'without being triumphant', was like a man who could finally breathe 'at the end of a long and hard subordination'.²³ However, three of the most talented men in the Empire, two of them supposedly his mortal enemies, regretted him. When Field-Marshal Rum­iantsev-Zadunaisky, natural son of Peter the Great, heard the news, his entourage expected him to celebrate. Instead, he knelt in front of an icon. 'What's so surprising?', he asked his companions. 'The Prince was my rival, even my enemy, but Russia has lost a great man ... immortal for his deeds.'²⁴ Bezborodko admitted he was 'indebted' to 'a very rare and exquisite man'.²⁵ Suvorov was sad, saying Potemkin was 'a great man and a man great, great in mind and height: not like that tall French ambassador in London about whom Lord Chancellor Bacon said that "the garret is badly furnished" ', but he was simultaneously 'the image of all earthly vanity'. Suvorov felt the heroic age was finished: Potemkin had used him as his own King Leonidas of Sparta. He twice went to pray at Potemkin's tomb.²⁶

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

Here rests not famed by war alone

A man whose soul was greater still

Gavrili Derzhavin, The Waterfall

The Prince's outrageous personality aroused such emotions in his lifetime and afterwards that it obscured any objective analysis of his achievements and indeed has distorted them grotesquely. His enemies accused him of laziness,

corruption, debauchery, indecision, extravagance, falsification, military incompetence and disinformation on a vast scale. The sybaritism and extrava­gance are the only ones that are truly justified. Even his enemies always admitted his intelligence, force of personality, spectacular vision, courage, generosity and great achievements. 'It cannot be denied', wrote Catherine's earliest biographer Castera, 'that he had the mind and courage and energy which, with the gradual unfolding of his talents, fitted him for a prime minister.' Ligne believed that, in making Potemkin, Nature had used 'the stuff she would usually have used to create a hundred men.'³¹

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

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