Catherine the Great & Potemkin

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  Diplomacy was regarded as the prerogative of the king. Sometimes monarchs pursued clandestine policies that were completely contrary to those of their own ministers: in this way, Louis XV’s blundering anti-Russian Polish policy, known as ‘le Secret’, managed to waste the last vestiges of French influence in Warsaw. Ambassadors and soldiers served kings, not countries. As Potemkin’s basse-cour and military entourage were to demonstrate, this was an age of cosmopolitanism when foreigners could find service in any court, especially in diplomacy and the army. Contemporaries would have regarded our view that a man can only serve the country in which he was born as silly and limiting.

  ‘I like to be a foreigner everywhere,’ the Prince de Ligne, international grand seigneur, told his French mistress, ‘as long as I have you and own some property somewhere.’ Ligne explained that ‘one loses respect in a country if one spends too much time there’.8 Embassies and armies were filled with various nationalities who excelled in those services: Livonian barons, Italian marcheses, German counts and, the most ubiquitous of all, Jacobite Scotsmen and Irishmen. Italians specialized in diplomacy, while the Scots and the Irish excelled at war.

  After the Fifteen and the Forty-Five Rebellions, many Celtic families found themselves spread across different countries: they were known as the ‘Flying Geese’ and many came to service in Russia.*4 Three families of ‘Flying Geese’ – the Laceys, Brownes and Keiths*5 – seem to have dominated the armies of Europe. The Keith brothers – George, the exiled Earl Marshal of Scotland, and his brother James – became Frederick the Great’s intimate friends after they had served Russia against the Turks. When General James Keith saluted an Ottoman envoy during those wars, he was amazed to hear a broad Scottish reply from beneath the turban of the Turk – a renegade Caledonian, from Kirkcaldy.9 At a typical battle such as Zorndorf in the Seven Years War, the commanders of the Russians, Prussians and nearby Swedes were called Fermor, Keith and Hamilton.

  Beneath the turgid etiquette, the competition between the ambassadors was an unscrupulous tournament to influence policy and gather information, starring adventurers of ersatz aristocracy, pickpocketing actresses, code-breakers, galloping couriers, letter-opening postmasters, maids, temptresses and noblewomen paid by foreign governments. Most despatches were intercepted by the Cabinet Noir, a secret government bureau that opened, copied and resealed letters, then broke their cyphers. The Russian Cabinet Noir was particularly effective.*6 Kings and diplomats took advantage of this system by not using code when they were writing something they wished a foreign government to know – this was called writing ‘en clair’.10

  Rival ambassadors employed an expensive network of spies, especially domestic servants, and they spent a fortune on paying ‘pensions’ to ministers and courtiers. Secret service funds were used either to secure information (hence English gifts to Alexandra Engelhardt) or to influence policy (Catherine herself received English loans during the 1750s). These latter payments often had no effect at all on policy and generally the scale of bribery was vastly exaggerated.11 Russia was reputed to be especially venal but it was probably no more so than France or England. In Russia, the main bidders for influence were England, France, Prussia and Austria. All were now to use every weapon in their arsenal to court the favour of Potemkin.

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  Europe faced three sources of conflict in 1778. France, eager to avenge the Seven Years War, was about to support the American rebels and go to war against England. (The war started in June 1778 and Spain joined the French side the next year.) However, Russia was much more concerned with the other two flashpoints. The Ottoman Sultan had never been reconciled to the terms of the 1774 Treaty of Kuchuk-Kainardzhi, especially the independence of the Crimea and the opening of the Black and Mediterranean Seas to Russian merchant ships. In November 1776, Catherine and Potemkin had to send an army to the Crimea to impose a khan of their choice, Shagin Giray, in the face of disturbances inspired by Constantinople. Now the Khanate was rebelling against Russia’s protégé, and the Ottoman and Russian Empires moved closer to war.

  The third axis of conflict was the rivalry for the mastery of Germany between Prussia and Austria. Russia always had a choice between alliance with Austria or Prussia: each had its own advantages. Russia had been allied with Austria from 1726, and it was only thanks to Peter III that it had switched to the Prussian option in 1762. Austria had not forgiven Russia for this betrayal, so Catherine and Frederick were stuck with each other. Foreign Minister Nikita Panin had staked his career on maintaining this alliance, but the Northern System – his network of northern powers including Britain – had never materialized beyond its Prussian fulcrum. Furthermore, it had given Frederick an influence over Russian policy in Poland and the Ottoman Empire that almost amounted to a veto.

  However, Potemkin always believed that Russia’s interests – and his own – lay southwards, not northwards. He cared about the Austrian–Prussian and Anglo-French conflicts only in so far as they affected Russia’s relations with the Ottoman Empire around the Black Sea. The victories in the Russo-Turkish War had exposed the irrelevance of the Prussian alliance along with Frederick’s duplicity.

  Serenissimus began to study diplomacy. ‘How courteous he is with everyone. He pretends to be jolly and chatty but it’s clear that he is only dissembling. Nothing he wants or asks for will be refused.’ In 1773–4, Potemkin had paid court ‘most assiduously’ to Nikita Panin.12 The Minister was a dyspeptic monument to the slowness and obstinacy of Russian bureaucracy – piggy-eyed, amused and shrewd, he squatted astride Russian foreign policy like a swollen, somnolent toad. The diplomats regarded Panin as ‘a great glutton, a great gamester and a great sleeper’, who once left a despatch, unopened, in his robe de chambre for four months. He ‘passes his life with women and courtesans of the second order’ with ‘all the tastes and whims of an effeminate young man’. In reply to the Swedish Ambassador’s brave attempt to discuss affairs of state during a meal, he delivered the bon mot: ‘It is evident, my dear Baron, that you are not accustomed to affairs of state if you let them interfere with dinner.’ There was not a little admiration in Harris’s tone when he told his Court that ‘you will not credit me if I tell you that out of 24 hours, Count Panin only gives half an hour to the discharge of his duties’.13

  Initially, Potemkin ‘thought only of establishing his favour well and did not occupy himself with foreign affairs in the direction of which Panin showed a predilection for the King of the Prussia’, noted the Polish King Stanislas-Augustus. Now he began to flex his muscles. Early in his friendship with Catherine, it is likely that Potemkin persuaded her that Russia’s interests were to maintain Peter the Great’s conquests on the Baltic and keep control of Poland, but then use an Austrian alliance to make the Black Sea a Russian lake. Catherine had never liked Frederick the Great nor trusted Panin, but Potemkin was suggesting a reversal of Russian policy in turning to Austria. This had to be done slowly – but tensions with Panin began to grow. When the Council sat one day, Potemkin reported that there was news of disturbances in Persia and suggested there might be benefits for Russia. Panin, fixated on Russia’s northern interests, attacked him bitterly, and an angry Potemkin broke up the meeting.14 The rivalry between the two statesmen and their two policies became more obvious.

  Panin was not going to give up without a fight, and Catherine had to move cautiously because Potemkin was as yet unproven on the international stage. Panin grew nervous as it became clear that Potemkin was there to stay. In June 1777, Corberon wrote that Panin had even said to a crony: ‘Wait. Things can’t stay like this for ever.’ But nothing came of it as Potemkin consolidated his power. Catherine was deliberately pushing Potemkin forward on foreign policy: she had asked him to discuss affairs with the visiting Prince Henry of Prussia. When Gustavus III of Sweden, who had recently retaken absolute power in a coup, arrived on an incognito visit calling himself Count of Gothland, Potemkin met him and accomp
anied him during his stay. Potemkin’s challenge was to destroy Panin’s power, overturn the Northern System and arrange an alliance that would let him pursue his dreams in the south.

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  The two eastern conflicts of Europe escalated simultaneously at the beginning of 1778 – in ways that made the Prussian alliance still more obsolete and freed Potemkin’s hand to begin building in the south. In both cases, Catherine and Potemkin co-ordinated diplomatic and military action.

  The first was the so-called ‘Potato War’. The Elector of Bavaria died in December 1777. Emperor Joseph II, whose influence was growing as his mother Maria Theresa aged, had long schemed to swap the Austrian Netherlands for Bavaria, which would increase his power in Germany and compensate for Austria’s loss of Silesia to Prussia. In January 1778, Austria occupied most of Bavaria. This threatened Prussia’s new Great Power status in the Holy Roman Empire, so Frederick, now aged sixty-five, rallied the German princes, threatened by Austrian aggrandizement, and in July invaded Habsburg Bohemia. Austria’s ally France was busy fighting Britain and would not support Joseph. Catherine was cool about aiding her Prussian ally too. Joseph marched towards Frederick. Central Europe was at war again. But neither side dared risk a pitched battle. There was skirmishing. The men spent a cold winter digging up paltry Bohemian potatoes, the only things left to eat – hence the ‘Potato War’.

  Meanwhile in the Crimea, now ‘independent’ of Istanbul after Kuchuk-Kainardzhi, the pro-Russian Khan Shagin Giray was overthrown by his own subjects. Potemkin ordered his troops in the Crimea to restore Shagin Giray. The Turks, who had even sent an abortive expedition in August 1777 to overthrow the Khan, needed a Western ally to support them against Russia, but Austria and Prussia were busy harvesting Bohemian potatoes and France was about to join the Americans in their War of Independence.

  Potemkin and Panin, secretly emerging as leaders of pro-Austrian and pro-Prussian factions, agreed with Catherine that Russia, though obliged by treaty to aid its ally Prussia, did not want a German war, which would weaken its position in the Crimea. France also did not wish these flashpoints to lead to war. Its sole aim was to prevent Britain finding a Continental ally. Thus, instead of encouraging war, France worked to reconcile the differences in both disputes. Russia offered to co-mediate with France between Prussia and Austria. In return for Catherine not helping Prussia, France agreed to mediate between Russia and the Turks.

  The mediators compelled Austria to back down. Catherine and Potemkin worked together while bickering about their own relationship, her favourites and his nieces. ‘Batinka,’ she wrote to the Prince, ‘I’ll be glad to receive the plan of operations from your hands…I’m angry with you, sir, why do you speak to me in parables?’15 Potemkin ordered a corps under Prince Repnin to march west to help Prussia. Both sides were supposed to have offered Potemkin vast bribes. The Austrian Chancellor Kaunitz offered ‘a considerable sum’, Frederick the Duchy of Courland. ‘Had I accepted the duchy of Courland it would not have been difficult for me to obtain the crown of Poland since the Empress might have induced the king to abdicate in my favour,’ Potemkin supposedly claimed later.16 In fact, there is no proof any money was offered or taken, especially since Frederick’s meanness was legendary.*7

  Peace was settled at Teschen on 2/13 May 1779 with Russia as guarantor of the status quo in the Holy Roman Empire. Russia and Turkey had come to an agreement in March at the convention of Ainalikawak, which recognized the independence of the Crimea with Shagin Giray as khan. Both these successes raised Catherine’s confidence and prestige in Europe.

  Serenissimus welcomed Prince Henry of Prussia back to Petersburg in 1778 to shore up the tottering Prussian alliance. The Hohenzollern did his best to cultivate Potemkin, flattering him that he ranked in a triumvirate with the two senior imperial figures. Henry was touched ‘by the marks of the Empress’s goodwill, the Grand Duke’s friendship and the attention of you, my Prince’.17 Henry knew Potemkin well by then. But one wonders if he was amused when Potemkin unleashed his pet monkey during discussions with the Empress, who started playing with it. Catherine revelled in the Hohenzollern’s astonishment. But whether Prince Henry realized it or not, these simian tricks were a sign that Potemkin was no longer interested in the Prussian alliance. Serenissimus sought any means to undermine Panin and advance his new strategy.

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  On 15 December 1777, Potemkin found his unwitting tool in this struggle. Sir James Harris arrived in Petersburg as the new minister plenipotentiary and envoy extraordinary of the Court of St James’s. Harris was a very different species of Anglo-Saxon from Potemkin’s friends Semple and Kingston. He was a fine advertisement for the suave and cultured English gentleman. Now aged thirty-two, he had made his reputation in a most eighteenth-century manner while on his first posting to Madrid. When Spain and Britain almost went to war over some obscure islands called the Falklands, he should have returned home but instead he lingered twenty miles outside Madrid conducting a love affair. He was therefore uncannily well placed to react quickly and adeptly when the war did not occur. His career was made.18

  Britain was fighting the Americans, backed by France, in their War of Independence, so Harris’s instructions from the Secretary of State for the North, the Earl of Suffolk, were to negotiate an ‘Offensive and Defensive Alliance’ with Russia, which was to provide naval reinforcements. Harris first applied to Panin, who was not inclined to help. Learning of Potemkin’s ‘inveterate hatred for Monsieur de Panin’,19 he decided to cultivate Serenissimus.

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  On 28 June 1779, Sir James screwed up his courage and approached the Prince in the Empress’s antechamber with the cheek and flattery most likely to win his attention. ‘I told him the moment was now come when Russia must act the greatest part in Europe – and he alone was adequate to direct the conduct of it.’ Harris had noticed Potemkin’s rising interest in international relations and admired his ‘very acute understanding and boundless ambition’. This was the beginning of a close friendship that confirmed Potemkin’s Anglophilia20 – but never his real commitment to an English alliance.

  Sir James Harris (like his French counterparts) presumed throughout his Russian mission that Potemkin’s and Catherine’s prime interest was the Anglo-French struggle, not Russia’s Turkish conflict. Potemkin took advantage of the deluded Anglocentricity of a Whig gentleman in the last days of Britain’s first world empire. So these two scenes – the rivalry of Western diplomats and the secret dreams of Potemkin and Catherine – were played out simultaneously, side by side. The only things Potemkin really had in common with Harris were love of England and hostility towards Panin.

  Serenissimus was delighted by Harris’s feelers and liked the Englishman, for he impulsively invited him to dinner in his family circle at a nephew’s country house. Initially, the Englishman denounced the depravity of Catherine and the ‘dissipation’ of Potemkin, but now he almost fell in love with the exuberance of the man he proudly called ‘my friend’.21 Harris begged Potemkin to send ‘an armament’, a naval expedition to help Britain, in return for some yet undecided benefit, to restore the balance of power and raise Russia’s influence. The Prince seemed struck with this idea and said, ‘Whom shall we trust to draw up this declaration and to whom for preparing the armament? Count Panin has neither the will nor the capacity…he is a Prussian and nothing else; Count Chernyshev [Navy Minister] is a villain and would betray any orders given him…’.22

  Potemkin was also being wooed by Corberon and the new Prussian envoy, Goertz, both of whom described his extravagance, fun and whimsy. But the Prussian was particularly impressed by a man ‘so superior by his genius…that everyone collapses before him’. Harris won this contest: Serenissimus agreed to arrange a private audience with the Empress so that the Englishman could put his case directly.23

  On 22 July 1779, Korsakov, the favo
urite of the day, approached Harris after Catherine had finished her card game at a masquerade and led him through the back way into the Empress’s private dressing-room. Harris proposed his alliance to the Empress, who was friendly but vague. She saw that Harris’s ‘Armament’ would embroil Russia in the Anglo-French war. Harris asked Catherine if she would give independence to America. ‘I’d rather lose my head,’ she replied vehemently. The next day, Harris delivered a memorandum, putting his case, to Potemkin.24

  Potemkin’s rivalry with Panin, seemed to work to Harris’s advantage – yet it should have made him cautious. When the Council met to discuss the British proposals, Catherine through the Prince asked Harris to produce another memorandum. When they talked about Panin’s conduct, Potemkin bamboozled the Englishman by claiming that ‘he had been so little conversant in foreign affairs that a great deal of what I said was entirely new to him’. But there was no quicker student than Potemkin.

  The Prince and Sir James spent their days and nights chatting, drinking, plotting and gambling. Potemkin may have been playing Harris like a game of poker, but he was also truly fond of him. One has the distinct sense that, while Harris was talking business, Potemkin was taking a course in English civilization. Couriers rushed between the two. Harris’s published letters give his official account of the friendship, but his unpublished letters to Potemkin in the Russian archives show the extent of their familiarity: one is about a wardrobe that one of Harris’s debtors gave him instead of the 1,500 guineas he was owed. ‘You’d give me incontestable proof of your friendship’, wrote the Envoy Extraordinary, ‘if you could get the Empress to buy it…Forgive me for talking to you so frankly…’. It is not recorded if Potemkin arranged this, but he was a generous friend. In May 1780, Harris sent his father, a respected Classical scholar, a ‘packet of Greek productions given to me for you by Prince Potemkin’. When Harris’s father died, Potemkin was assiduous in his sympathy. In an undated note, the envoy thanked him: ‘I’m not yet in a state to come round to your place my Prince but the part you’ve been kind enough to play in my sadness has softened it infinitely…No one could love you, esteem you, respect you more than I.’25