Catherine the Great & Potemkin

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  ‘Sweetheart,’ the Empress wrote on 5 May, ‘because you asked me to send you with something to the Council today, I wrote a note that must be given to Prince Viazemsky. So if you want to go, you must be ready by twelve o’clock. I’m sending you the note and the report of the Kazan Commission.’21 This note asking Potemkin to discuss the Secret Commission created to investigate and punish the Pugachev rebels sounds casual, but it was not: Catherine was inviting Potemkin to join the Council. Potemkin ostentatiously delivered the note to Procurator-General Viazemsky and then sat down at the top table: he was never to leave it. ‘In no other country’, Gunning informed London the next day, ‘do favourites rise so fast. To the great surprise of the Council members, General Potemkin took his place among them.’22

  It was about this time that the Kazan Secret Commission uncovered a ‘plot’ to assassinate Catherine at her summer residence, Tsarskoe Selo: a captured Pugachev supporter had confessed under interrogation that assassins had been despatched. Potemkin arranged the investigation with Viazemsky: ‘I think the mountain will give birth to a mouse,’23 Catherine bravely told Potemkin. He was alarmed, but it turned out the story was probably invented under interrogation by the Commission in the south, one reason why Catherine was against the Russian habit of knouting suspects. She was too far away to prevent the Commission using torture on rebels, though she tried to get Bibikov to minimize its use.24

  On 30 May, Potemkin was promoted to General-en-Chef and Vice-President of the College of War. It is easy for us to forget that, while this tough factional battle was going on in the councils of the Empress, Potemkin and Catherine were still enjoying the first glow of their affair. On possibly the very same day as his promotion, the Empress sent Potemkin this note in babyish love-talk: ‘General loves me? Me loves General a lot.’25 The undermined War Minister Chernyshev was ‘hit so hard’, reported Gunning, ‘that he could not remain at his post…’.26 The lame duck soon resigned to become governor of the new Belorussian provinces, taken in the First Partition of Poland. There ended the factional crisis that had started two years earlier with the fall of Prince Orlov.

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  Honours, responsibilities, serfs, estates and riches rained down on Potemkin: on 31 March he had been appointed Governor-General of New Russia, the huge southern provinces that bordered on the Tartar Khanate of the Crimea and the Ottoman Empire; on 21 June, he was made commander-in-chief of all irregular forces, namely his beloved Cossacks. It is hard to imagine the scale of wealth that Potemkin suddenly enjoyed. It was a world away from his upbringing in Chizhova or even his godfather’s house in Moscow. A peasant soldier in the Russian infantry was paid about seven roubles a year; an officer around 300. Potemkin regularly received gifts of 100,000 roubles on his namedays, on holidays or to celebrate his particular help on a given project. He had a huge table allowance of 300 roubles a month. He lived and was served by the imperial servants in all the palaces for free. He was said to receive 12,000 roubles on the first of every month on his dressing table, but it is more likely that Catherine simply handed him thousands of roubles when she felt like it, as Vassilchikov had testified. Potemkin spent as easily as he received, finding it embarrassing on one hand, while, on the other, constantly demanding more. Yet he was still far from touching the ceiling of either his income or his extravagance. Soon there was to be no ceiling on either.27

  Catherine made sure that Potemkin received as many Russian and foreign medals as possible – to increase his status was to consolidate hers. Monarchs liked to procure foreign medals for their favourites. The foreign monarchs resented handing them out – especially to the lovers of usurping regicides. But, unless there was a very good excuse, they usually gave in. The correspondence about these awards between monarchs and Russian ambassadors are most amusing studies in the tortuously polite, almost coded euphemism that was the language of courtly diplomacy.

  ‘Good morning sweetheart,’ Catherine greeted Potemkin playfully around this time, ‘…I got up and sent to the Vice-Chancellor asking for the ribbons; I wrote that they were for…General Potemkin and I planned to put them on him after mass. Do you know him? He’s handsome, he’s as clever as he is handsome. And he loves me as much as he’s handsome and clever and I love him too…’.28 That day, he got the Russian Order of St Alexander Nevsky and the Polish Order of the White Eagle, kindly sent by King Stanislas-Augustus. There was prestige in these orders, though the higher nobility regarded them as their due: one of Potemkin’s more winning characteristics was his childish delight in medals. Soon he had collected Peter the Great’s Order of St Andrew; Frederick the Great sent the Prussian Black Eagle; Denmark sent the White Elephant; Sweden the Holy Seraphim. But Louis XVI and Maria Theresa refused the Holy Ghost and the Golden Fleece respectively, claiming they were only for Catholics. In London, George III was shocked by his ambassador’s attempt to procure Potemkin the Garter.29

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  ‘It seems the Empress is going to commit the reins of government to Potemkin,’ Gunning told London. Indeed the unthinkable had happened: Potemkin was now Prince Orlov’s superior. The foreign ambassadors could not swallow this. They had become so used to the Orlovs that they could not believe that they were not about to return to power at any minute. The Orlovs could not believe it either.

  Prince Orlov stormed in to see Catherine on 2 June – an alarming sight, even for an Empress. ‘They say’, reported the well-informed Gunning, ‘Orlov and Catherine had it out.’30 Prince Orlov had always been good-natured, but now he was permanently and dangerously irascible. His temper, once released, was fearsome. Indeed Catherine called him a ‘madcap’ and was upset by whatever Orlov said to her. But she was capable of dealing with him too: he agreed ‘to travel abroad’ again. She did not care. She had Potemkin: ‘Goodnight my friend. Send to tell me tomorrow how you are. Bye – I’m very bored without you.’31

  On 9 June, Rumiantsev took the offensive against the Turks, despatching two corps across the Danube, which defeated their main army near Kozludzhi. This cut the Grand Vizier off from the Danubian forts. Russian cavalry galloped south past Shumla into today’s Bulgaria.

  Catherine and Potemkin were sorry to learn of the sudden death from fever of Pugachev’s vanquisher, Bibikov, but the Rebellion seemed over and they appointed the mediocre Prince Fyodor Shcherbatov to succeed him. Suddenly, in early July, Catherine learned that Pugachev, despite his defeats, had resurfaced with another army. She sacked Shcherbatov and appointed another, General Prince Peter Golitsyn: ‘I’m sending you my dear the letter that I’ve done to Prince Shcherbatov. Correct it please and then I’ll have it read to the Council.’ The Empress wrote optimistically to Potemkin, ‘it’ll hit the nail on the head’.32

  On 20 June, the Turks sued for peace: usually this would have meant a truce, a congress and the months of negotiating that had ruined the last peace talks. This is where Potemkin’s advice to ‘empower’ Rumiantsev bore fruit, because the Field-Marshal set up camp in the Bulgarian village of Kuchuk-Kainardzhi and told the Turks that either they signed peace or the two armies went back to war. The Ottomans began to talk; news of a peace treaty was expected any day; Catherine’s spirits rose. Everything was going so well.

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  A new Pugachev crisis struck Catherine in mid-July. On the 11th, Pugachev appeared before the ancient and strategic city of Kazan with a swelling army of 25,000. The supposedly defeated Pugachev was not defeated at all, but he was being pursued by the true hero of the Rebellion, the tirelessly competent Lieutenant-Colonel Ivan Mikhelson. Kazan was a mere 93 miles from Nizhny Novgorod and that was just over a hundred miles from Moscow itself. The old Tartar city, conquered by Ivan the Terrible in 1556, had 11,000 inhabitants and mainly wooden buildings. It happened that General Pavel Potemkin, the new appointee to run both the Kazan and Orenburg Secret Commissions, had arrived in Kazan on 9 July, two days before Puga
chev. The old Governor was ill. Pavel Potemkin took over the command, but he possessed only 650 infantry and 200 unreliable Chuvash cavalry, so he barricaded his forces in the citadel. On the 12th, Pugachev stormed Kazan, which was razed in an infernal orgy of violence that lasted from 6 a.m. to midnight. Anyone in ‘German dress’ or without a beard was killed; women in ‘German dress’ were delivered to the pretender’s camp. The city was reduced to ashes before Pugachev’s army escaped, leaving Pavel Potemkin to be rescued by Mikhelson.

  The Volga region was now one teeming peasant rebellion. The Rebellion had taken an even nastier turn: it had started as a Cossack rising. Now it became a savage class war, a regular jacquerie, meaning a slaughter of landowners by peasants, named after the rebellion in northern France in 1358. The regime faced the prospect of the millions of serfs massacring their masters. This was a threat not just to Catherine but to the very foundations of the Empire. Factory serfs, peasants and 5,000 Bashkir horsemen now followed the flag of the pretender. Serfs rose in village after village. Gangs of runaway slaves roamed the countryside. Rebel Cossacks galloped through the villages urging the serfs to rise.*1 On 21 July, the news of the fall of Kazan reached Catherine in Petersburg. The authorities in the centre began to panic. Would Pugachev march on Moscow?33

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  The next day the Empress held an emergency Council meeting at Peterhof. She declared that she would travel directly to Moscow to rally the Empire. The Council heard this in smouldering silence. No one dared speak. The members of the Council were worried and uneasy. Catherine herself was rattled: Kazan made her seem suddenly vulnerable. Unusually for her, she showed it. Some of the magnates, especially Prince Orlov and the two Chernyshev brothers, bitterly resented Potemkin’s rise and Panin’s resurgence.

  The Council was stunned by the Empress’s wish to go to Moscow. Its defeated silence reflected the depth ‘of the wordless depression’. Catherine turned to her senior minister, Nikita Panin, and asked his opinion of her idea. ‘My answer’, he wrote to his brother, General Peter Panin, ‘was that it would not only be bad but disastrous,’ because it smacked of fear at the top. Catherine passionately argued the benefits of her descent on Moscow. Potemkin backed her. The Moscow option may have been his idea because as the most old Russian among these cultured grandees, he instinctively saw Moscow as the Orthodox capital when the Motherland was in danger. Equally, he may simply have agreed with her because he was too new there to risk independence of Catherine.

  The reaction of most of the Council members was almost comical: Prince Orlov refused to give an opinion at all, claiming like a child that he felt off colour, had not slept well and did not have any ideas. Kirill Razumovsky and Field-Marshal Alexander Golitsyn, a pair of ‘fools’, could not summon up a word. Zakhar Chernyshev ‘trembled between the favourites’ – Orlov and Potemkin – and managed to emit ‘half-words twice’. It was recognized that there was no one of any military weight on the Volga to co-ordinate Pugachev’s defeat: ‘a distinguished personage’ was required. But who? Orlov presumably went off to get his beauty sleep while the downhearted Council resolved nothing, other than to wait for news of the Turkish peace treaty.34

  Nikita Panin had an idea. After dinner, he took Potemkin aside and proposed that the ‘distinguished personage’ to save Russia was none other than his brother, General Peter Ivanovich Panin. There was something to be said for this: he was a victorious battle general with the aristocratic credentials necessary to soothe the fears of landowners. He was already in Moscow. But there was a problem with Peter Panin. He was a rude, arrogant and snobbish curmudgeon for whom the word ‘martinet’ might have been invented. Even for a Russian soldier in the eighteenth century, many of his loudly declared views were absurd: he was a pedant on the privileges of nobles and the minutiae of military etiquette and flaunted a stalwart belief that only men were qualified to be tsar. This harsh disciplinarian and spluttering tyrant was capable of appearing in the anteroom of his headquarters in a grey satin nightgown and a high French nightcap with pink ribbons.35 Catherine loathed him, distrusted him politically and even had him under secret police surveillance.

  So Nikita Panin, not daring to raise his brother aloud at the Council, cautiously approached Potemkin, who went straight to the Empress. She was probably furious at the very thought of it. Perhaps he persuaded her that they had little choice when they felt as if even her closest supporter were wavering. She agreed. When Nikita Panin spoke to her later, the Empress dissembled her real views and, ever the actress, graciously swore that she wanted Peter Panin to take supreme command of the Volga provinces and ‘save Moscow and the internal parts of the Empire’. Nikita Panin immediately wrote to his brother.36

  The Panins had pulled off what was almost a coup d’état, forcing Catherine to swallow the humiliation of the hated Peter Panin saving the Empire. They were now, in their way, as much of a threat to Catherine and Potemkin as Pugachev. Having gulped Panin’s distasteful medicine, the lovers at once realized that they had to water it down. It was to get worse before it got better: the Panins demanded massive viceregal powers for the general over all towns, courts and Secret Commissions in the four huge provinces affected, and over all military forces (except Rumiantsev’s First Army, the Second Army occupying the Crimea and the units in Poland), as well as power to issue death sentences. ‘You see my friend,’ Catherine told Potemkin, ‘from the enclosed pieces, that Count Panin wants to make his brother the dictator of the best parts of the Empire.’ She was determined not to raise this ‘first-class liar…who has personally offended me, above all the mortals in the Empire’. Potemkin took over the negotiations with the Panins and the management of the Rebellion.37

  Catherine and Potemkin did not know that, before Kazan had fallen, Rumiantsev had signed an extremely beneficial peace with the Turks – the Treaty of Kuchuk-Kainardzhi. On the evening of 23 July, two couriers, one of them Rumiantsev’s son, galloped into Peterhof with the news. Catherine’s mood changed from despair to gloating enthusiasm. ‘I think today is the happiest day of my life,’ she told the Governor of Moscow.38 The Treaty gave Russia a toehold on the Black Sea, granting the fortresses of Azov, Kerch, Yenikale and Kinburn and the narrow strip of coastline between the Dnieper and Bug rivers. Russian merchant ships could pass through the Straits into the Mediterranean. She could build a Black Sea Fleet. The Khanate of the Crimea became independent of the Ottoman Sultan. This success was to make Potemkin’s achievements possible. Catherine ordered extravagant festivities. The Court moved to Oranienbaum three days later to celebrate.

  This strengthened Potemkin’s position with Peter Panin, who waited excitedly in Moscow for confirmation of his dictatorial powers. The surviving drafts of these powers show that Catherine and Potemkin were equally excited about cutting the Panins down to size. They certainly did not hurry: Nikita Panin now realized that he might have overplayed his hand: ‘I could see from the first day that this affair was considered…an extreme humiliation.’ Potemkin was not overawed by the Panins: ‘he doesn’t listen to anything and doesn’t want to listen but decides everything with his mind’s impudence.’39

  When Potemkin wrote to Peter Panin a few days later with the Empress’s instructions, he spelt out, with all that ‘impudence’, that the appointment was completely thanks to his own efforts with the Empress: ‘I’m absolutely sure that Your Excellency will treat my actions as a good turn to you.’40 General Panin received his orders on 2 August – he was only to command forces already fighting Pugachev and enjoy authority over Kazan, Orenburg and Nizhny Novgorod. Potemkin still had his tough cousin Pavel Sergeievich in Kazan as a counterbalance to the overmighty Panin: authority was split between them. Panin’s job was to destroy the Pugachev forces; Pavel Potemkin was to arrest, interrogate and punish. Not all the members of the Council quite understood that Peter Panin was not to be ‘dictator’: when Viazemsky suggested placing Pavel Potemkin’s Secret Commission under Panin, he re
ceived a laconic rebuttal in the imperial hand: ‘No, because it is under me.’41

  The latest news from the Volga weakened the Panins yet further. It emerged that Mikhelson had beaten Pugachev several times right after the fall of Kazan, so that the news of its sacking was out of date by the time it rocked the Council in Petersburg. Far from marching on Moscow, Pugachev escaped southwards. Catherine’s political crisis had passed. The celebrations for the victory over the Turks began at Oranienbaum on the 27th with parties for the diplomatic corps. But Catherine was still busy watching the strange disturbances on the Volga.

  It was always hard to tell if Pugachev was fleeing or advancing. Even his flight resembled an invasion. Rabbles rallied to him, towns surrendered, manors burned, necks snapped, bells were rung. In the remote Lower Volga, the local towns kept falling, culminating on 6 August in the sack of Saratov, where renegade priests administered oaths of allegiance to Pugachev and his wife, which undermined his imposture even more. Twenty-four landowners and twenty-one officials were hanged. But Pugachev was doing what every cornered criminal does: heading home, to the Don.

  The victors swiftly fell out among themselves: Peter Panin and Pavel Potemkin, both arrogant and aggressive, undermined each other wherever possible on behalf of their respective relations in Petersburg. This was precisely the reason Potemkin had divided their responsibilities.

  Pugachev arrived in the land of the Don Cossacks before Tsaritsyn,*2 and learned the hard way that a pretender is never honoured in his own country. When he parleyed with Don Cossacks, they realized that ‘Peter III’ was the boy they remembered as Emelian Pugachev. They did not rally. Pugachev, still with 10,000 rebels, fled downriver and was then arrested by his own men. ‘How dare you raise your hands against your emperor!’, he cried. It was to no avail. The ‘Amperator’ had no clothes left. He was handed over to Russian forces in Yaiksk, where the Rebellion had started a year earlier. There was a glut of forceful and ambitious soldiers on the Lower Volga – Pavel Potemkin, Panin, Mikhelson and Alexander Suvorov – among whom there was an undignified scrummage to claim credit for capturing the ‘state villain’ even though none of them had actually done so. Suvorov delivered Pugachev to Peter Panin, who refused to allow Pavel Potemkin to interrogate him.42 Like children telling tales to their teachers, they spent August to December writing complaints to Petersburg. Often their contradictory letters arrived on the same day.43 Now that the crisis was over and the lovers were in firm control, Catherine and Potemkin were half outraged, half amused by this squabbling. ‘My love,’ wrote Catherine some time in September, ‘Pavel is right. Suvorov had no more part in this [capture of Pugachev] than Thomas [her dog].’ Potemkin spoke for everyone when he wrote to Peter Panin: ‘We are all filled with joy that the miscreant has come to an end.’44