Catherine the Great & Potemkin

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

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

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

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

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

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

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

  There was vanity in his disappearance too: his blind eye was certainly half closed – but not lost.*1 He was ashamed of it and probably believed that the Empress would now be disgusted by him. Potemkin’s over-sensitivity was one of his most winning qualities. Even as a famous statesman, he almost always refused to pose for portraits because he felt disfigured. He convinced himself that his career was over. Certainly his opponents revelled in his ruined looks: the Orlovs nicknamed him after the one-eyed giants of Homer’s Odyssey. ‘Alcibiades’, they said, had become the ‘Cyclops’.

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  Potemkin was gone for eighteen lost months. The Empress sometimes asked the Orlovs about him. It is said she even cancelled some of her little gatherings she so missed his mimicry. She sent him messages through anonymous lady-friends. Catherine later told Potemkin that Countess Bruce always informed her that he still loved her.30 Finally, according to Samoilov, the Empress sent this message through the go-between: ‘It is a great pity that a person of such rare merits is lost from society, the Motherland and those who value him and are sincerely well disposed to him.’31 This must have raised his hopes. When Catherine drove by his retreat, she is said to have ordered Grigory Orlov to summon Potemkin back to Court. The honourable and frank Orlov always showed respect for Potemkin to the Empress. Besides he probably believed that, with Potemkin’s looks ruined and his confidence broken, he was no longer a threat.32

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

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

  Indeed the Count’s kindness to young Potemkin was typical of the lack of snobbery of this Cossack ex-shepherd who was one of the most likeable of Catherine’s magnates. It was said Razumovsky had been a peasant at sixteen and a Field-Marshal at twenty-two, which was almost true.*2 Whenever his sons, who grew up to be proud Russian aristocrats, were embarrassed by his humble Cossack beginnings, he used to shout for his valet: ‘Here, bring me the peasant’s rags in which I came to St Petersburg. I want to recall the happy time when I drove my cattle crying, “Tsop! Tsop!”.’35 He lived in fabulous state – he was said to have introduced champagne to Russia. Potemkin, who certainly enjoyed the sparkling stories (and probably the sparkling wine) of this cheerful raconteur, became obsessed by the Cossacks: did the enthusiasm of a lifetime start over the ex-Hetman’s champagne at the Razumovsky Palace? The real reason there would be no marriage was that Potemkin still loved Catherine and that she held out some sort of glorious hope for the future.36 Catherine ‘has at times had eyes for others’, wrote the British envoy, the Earl of Buckinghamshire, ‘particularly for an amiable and accomplished man, who is not undeserving of her affection; he has good advisers and is not without some chance of success.’37 The ‘accomplishment’ makes him sound like Potemkin and his ‘good advisers’ could not be any better placed than Countess Bruce.

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

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

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

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

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

  Potemkin escorted the Empress when she attended some of the Commission’s sessions. He would have read the Instruction: his vast library later contained every work Catherine used – Montesquieu’s Esprit des lois, all thirty-five volumes of Diderot’s Encyclopaedia (in French) and tomes of Voltaire. But he did not take the floor.40 The Commission itself did not succeed in codifying the laws, but instead became a talking shop. It did succeed in collecting useful information for Catherine’s future legislation. The Commission also coined the sobriquet ‘Catherine the Great’, which she refused. Her stay reminded Catherine how much she disliked Moscow so she returned to Petersburg, where she re-convened the Commission in February 1768. The coming of war finally gave her the excuse to end its ponderous deliberations.41

  On 22 September 1768 Potemkin was promoted from Kammerjunker to receive the ceremonial key of a Kamerherr – chamberlain42 of the Court. Unusually he was still to remain in the military, where he was promoted to captain of Horse-Guards. Then, two months later, he was removed from the army and attached to the Court full time on Catherine’s specific orders. For once, Potemkin did not want to be at Court at all. On 25 September 1768, the Ottoman Empire declared war on Russia. Potemkin saw his chance.

  Skip Notes

  *1 This did not stop one diplomat claiming he had ‘procured a glass eye in Paris’.

  *2 Brother of the Empress Elisabeth’s favourite, he was appointed Hetman of the Ukraine in his early twenties. This meant that he was the governor of the nominally semi-independent Cossack borderlands throughout Elisabeth’s reign. Razumovsky backed Catherine’s coup, then requested that she make the Hetmanate hereditary in his family. She refused, abolished the Hetmanate, replacing it with a College of Little Russia, and made him a field-marshal instead.

  5

  THE WAR HERO

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

  Field-Marshal Count Peter Rumiantsev-Zadunaisky on General Potemkin during the First Russo–Turkish War

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

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

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

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

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

  Subject slave of Your Imperial Majesty,

  Grigory Potemkin.1

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

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

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

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

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

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