Catherine the Great & Potemkin

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  Serenissimus worked with Catherine’s ministers, such as Procurator-General Viazemsky and President of the College of Commerce Alexander Vorontsov (Simon’s brother). Potemkin, famed for his subtle political intrigues, disdained conventional Court politics: he regarded the ministers, particularly Vorontsov, ‘with the greatest contempt’ and he told Harris that ‘even if he could get rid of them, he did not see anybody better to put in their places’.14 Bezborodko was the only one he seemed to respect. Potemkin proudly told Catherine that he never tried to build a party in Petersburg. He regarded himself as a royal consort, not a jobbing politician or a mere favourite. The only other member of his party was Catherine.

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  The first step towards the Greek Project was a détente with Austria. Both sides had been moving in this direction for some time and making encouraging diplomatic signals. The Holy Roman Emperor and co-ruler of the Habsburg Monarchy, Joseph II, never gave up on the Bavarian scheme that had led to the Potato War. He realized he needed Potemkin and Catherine to win Bavaria, which would make his Habsburg lands more compact and coherent. To this end, Joseph had to coax Russia away from Panin’s cherished alliance with Prussia. If, in the process, he could increase his realm at the expense of the Ottoman Empire, so much the better. All roads led to Petersburg.

  Joseph and his mother Maria Theresa had for years regarded Catherine as a nymphomaniacal regicide whom they called ‘The Catherinized Princess of Zerbst’. Now Joseph weighed up a Russian alliance over his mother’s opposition. His instincts were backed by his Chancellor, Prince Wenzel von Kaunitz-Rietberg, who had engineered the Diplomatic Revolution of 1756 to ally Austria with its old enemy France. Kaunitz was a vain, cold-hearted and libidinous neurotic who was so afraid of illness that he made Maria Theresa close her windows. His elaborate teeth-cleaning exercises at the end of each meal were the most disgusting feature of public life in Vienna. Kaunitz made sure that Austria’s envoy in Petersburg, Cobenzl, took care ‘to place relations with Monsieur de Potemkin on the footing of good friendship…Tell me how you are getting on with him now.’15

  On 22 January 1780, Joseph sent a message to Catherine, through her envoy in Vienna, Prince Dmitri Golitsyn, that he would like to meet her. The timing was ideal. She agreed on 4 February, informing only Potemkin, Bezborodko and a discontented Nikita Panin. It was set for 27 May in Mogilev in Belorussia.16

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  Empress and Prince keenly anticipated this meeting. Between February and April, they discussed it back and forth. The tension told on both of them. They calmed each other like a married couple and then exulted in their schemes like a pair of conspirators. Some time in April, Catherine’s lover Lanskoy told her that the sensitive Potemkin’s ‘soul is full of anxieties’. Probably he was worrying about the array of intrigues against his southern plans, but she soothed him with her ‘true friendship that you will always find in my heart…and in the heart attached to mine, [that is, Lanskoy’s], who loves and respects you as much as I do’. She ended tenderly: ‘Our only sorrow concerns you, that you’re anxious.’ Potemkin snapped at poor little Lanskoy, who ran to Catherine. She was concerned that her favourite had irritated the Prince: ‘Please let me know if Alexander Dmitrievich [Lanskoy] annoyed you somehow and if you are angry with him and why exactly.’ There were even hints of the old days when they were lovers, though perhaps they were just discussing their plans: ‘My dear friend, I’ve finished dinner and the door of the little staircase is open. If you want to talk to me, you may come.’

  At the end of April, Serenissimus rode off to prepare the reception for the Tsarina and the Holy Roman Emperor – in Mogilev. It was his policy, and Catherine gave him the responsibility to set the scene. As soon as he departed, Catherine missed her consort. ‘I’m without my friend, my Prince,’ she wrote to him. Excited letters flew between them. On 9 May 1780, Catherine left Tsarskoe Selo with a suite that included the nieces Alexandra and Ekaterina Engelhardt, and Bezborodko. Nikita Panin was left behind. As the Emperor Joseph arrived in Mogilev to be greeted by Potemkin, Catherine was approaching on the road from Petersburg. She and her consort were still discussing the last-minute details of the meeting and missing each other. ‘If you find a better way, please let me know,’ she wrote about her schedule – then she signed off: ‘Goodbye my friend, we are sick at heart without you. I’m dying to see you as soon as possible.’17

  Skip Notes

  *1 One, who later reigned as Mahmud II, was supposedly the son of that favourite odalisque, Aimée Dubucq de Rivery, cousin of the future Empress Josephine.

  *2 Even Potemkin’s valet, Zakhar Constantinov, was a Greek.

  15

  THE HOLY ROMAN EMPEROR

  Is it not you who dared raise up

  The power of Russia, Catherine’s spirit

  And with support of both desired

  To carry thunder to those rapids

  On which the ancient Rome did stand

  And trembled all the universe?

  Gavrili Derzhavin, The Waterfall

  On 21 May 1780, Prince Potemkin welcomed Emperor Joseph II, travelling under the incognito of Comte de Falkenstein, to Russia. It is hard to imagine two more different and ill-suited men. The uptight, self-regarding Austrian martinet wished to discuss politics immediately, while the Prince insisted on taking him off to the Orthodox Church. ‘Just up to now, commonplaces have been all the conversation with Potemkin and he hasn’t uttered a word of politics,’ the Emperor, thirty-nine, balding, oval-faced and quite handsome for a Habsburg, grumbled to his disapproving mother, the Empress–Queen Maria Theresa. Joseph’s impatience did not matter because Catherine was only a day away. The Emperor continued to chomp at the bit – but Potemkin displayed only an enigmatic affability: this was a deliberate political manoeuvre to let Joseph come to him. No one knew what Potemkin and Catherine were planning, but Frederick the Great and the Ottoman Sultan observed the meeting with foreboding, since it was aimed primarily at them.

  The Prince handed the Emperor a letter from Catherine which plainly revealed her hopes: ‘I swear at this moment there is nothing more difficult than to hide my sentiments of joy. The very name Monsieur le Comte de Falkenstein inspires such confidence…’.1 Potemkin recounted his impressions of Joseph to Catherine, and the partners impatiently discussed their meaning. The Prince passed on Joseph’s extravagant compliments about the Empress. The spirit of their unique partnership is captured in Catherine’s letter when she was just a day away: ‘Tomorrow I hope to be with you, everyone is missing you…We’ll try to figure out Falk[enstein] together.’2

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  This was easier said than done: the Emperor’s awkward character baffled contemporaries – and historians. No one so represented the incongruities of the Enlightened despot: Joseph was an uncomfortable cross between an expansionist and militaristic autocrat and a philosophe who wished to liberate his people from the superstitions of the past. He thought he was a military genius and philosopher–king like his hero Frederick the Great (the enemy who had almost destroyed Joseph’s own inheritance). Joseph’s ideals were admirable, but he despised his fellow man, was tactless and lacked all conception that politics was the art of the possible. His over-strenuous doctrinaire reforms stemmed from an austere vanity that made him somewhat ridiculous: he believed that the state was his person.

  Joseph’s incognito was the symbol of his whole philosophy of monarchy. He was as pompous and self-righteous about his name as he was about his living arrangements and his reforms. ‘You know that…in all my travels I rigidly observe and jealously guard my rights and the advantages that the character of Comte de Falkenstein gives me,’ Joseph instructed Cobenzl, ‘so I will, as a result, be in uniform but without orders…You will take care to arrange very small and ordinary quarters at Mogilev.’3

  This self-declared ‘first
clerk of the state’ wore a plain grey uniform, travelled with only one or two companions, wished to eat only simple inn food and liked to sleep on a military mattress in a roadside tavern rather than a palace. This was to create a challenge for the impresario of the visit, Potemkin, but he rose to it. Russia had few of the flea-bittern taverns the Emperor expected, so Potemkin dressed up manorhouses to look like inns.

  The Emperor prided himself on perpetually inspecting everything from dawn till dusk. He never understood that inactivity can be masterful – hence the Prince de Ligne’s comment that ‘he governed too much and did not reign enough…’. Ligne understood Joseph well – and adored him: ‘As a man he has the greatest merit…as a prince, he will have continual erections and never be satisfied. His reign will be a continual Priapism.’ Since the death of his father in 1765, Joseph had reigned as Holy Roman Emperor or, as the Germans called it, Kaiser, but had to share power over the Habsburg Monarchy – which encompassed Austria, Hungary, Galicia, the Austrian Netherlands, Tuscany and parts of modern Yugoslavia – with his mother, the formidable, humane and astute Maria Theresa. For all her prudishness and rigid Catholic piety, she had laid the foundations for Joseph’s reforms – but he imposed them so stringently that they first became a joke and then a disaster. He later took steps towards the emancipation of the serfs and the Jews, who no longer had to wear the Yellow Star of David, could worship freely, attend universities and engage in trade. He disdained his nobles; yet his reforms rained on his peoples like baton blows. He could not understand their obstinate ingratitude. When he banned coffins to save wood and time, he was baffled by the outrage that forced him to reverse his decision. ‘God, he even wants to put their souls in uniform,’ exclaimed Mirabeau. ‘That’s the summit of despotism.’

  His emotional life was tragic: his talented first wife, Isabella of Parma, preferred her sister-in-law to her husband in what seemed to be a lesbian affair, but he loved her. When she died young after three years of marriage, Joseph, then twenty-two, was inconsolable. ‘I have lost everything. My adored wife, the object of all my tenderness, my only friend is gone…I hardly know if I am still alive.’ Seven years later, his only child, a cherished daughter, died of pleurisy: ‘One thing that I ask you to let me have is her white dimity dressing gown, embroidered with flowers…’. Yet even these sad emotional outbursts were about himself rather than anyone else. He remarried a hideous Wittelsbach heiress, Josepha, to lay claim to her Bavaria, then treated her callously. ‘Her figure is short, thickset and without a vestige of charm,’ he wrote. ‘Her face is covered in spots and pimples. Her teeth are horrible.’

  His sex life afterwards alternated between princesses and prostitutes, and, if he thought he might fall in love with a woman, he drained himself of any desire by visiting a whore first. Ligne recalled that he had ‘no idea of good cheer or amusements, neither did he read anything except official papers’. He regarded himself as a model of rational decency and all others with sarcastic disdain. As a man, he was a bloodless husk; as a ruler, ‘the greatest enemy of this prince’, wrote Catherine, ‘was himself’. This was the Kaiser whom Potemkin needed to pull off the greatest achievements of his career.4

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  On 24 May 1780, the Empress of Russia entered Mogilev through the triumphal arch, escorted by squadrons of Cuirassiers – a sight that impressed even the sardonic Kaiser: ‘It was beautiful – all the Polish nobility on horseback, hussars, cuirassiers, lots of generals…finally she herself in a carriage of two seats with Maid-of-Honour Miss Engelhardt…’. As cannons boomed and bells rang, the Empress, accompanied by Potemkin and Field-Marshal Rumiantsev-Zadunaisky, attended church and then drove to the Governor’s residence. It was the beginning of four days of theatre, song and of course fireworks. No expense was spared to transform this drab provincial capital, gained from Poland only in 1772 and teeming with Poles and Jews, into a town fit for Caesars. The Italian architect Brigonzi had built a special theatre where his compatriot Bonafina sang for the guests.

  Joseph put on his uniform and ‘Prince Potemkin took me to court.’5 Serenissimus introduced the two Caesars, who liked each other at once, both dreaming no doubt of Hagia Sofia. They talked politics after dinner, alone except for Potemkin and his niece–mistress Alexandra Engelhardt. Catherine called Joseph ‘very intelligent, he loves to talk and he talks very well’. Catherine talked too. She did not formally propose the Greek Project or partition of the Ottoman Empire, but both knew why they were there. She hinted at her Byzantine dreams, for Joseph told his mother that her ‘project of establishing an empire in the east rolls around in her head and broods in her soul’. The next day, they got on so well at an opéra comique that Joseph had confided plans that ‘I don’t dare publish’ – as Catherine boasted to Grimm. They meant to impress each other. They had to like each other. They made very sure they did.6

  There was still opposition to this realignment, not just from Panin and the Prussophile Grand Duke Paul. Rumiantsev-Zadunaisky inquired if these festivities augured an Austrian alliance – a query that was the prerogative of a prickly war hero. The Empress replied, ‘it would be advantageous in a Turkish war and Prince Potemkin advised it’. Rumiantsev-Zadunaisky sourly recommended taking her own counsel instead. ‘One mind is good,’ replied Catherine laconically, ‘but two, better.’7 That was the way they worked together.

  Joseph, the obsessional inspector, rose early and inspected whatever he could find. Like many a talentless soldier – Peter III and Grand Duke Paul come to mind – he believed that enough inspections and parades would transform him into Frederick the Great. Potemkin politely escorted him to inspect the Russian army, but evidently found his strutting pace tiresome. When Joseph kept mentioning one of Potemkin’s ‘magnificent regiments’, which he had not yet inspected, the Prince did not want to go because of ‘bad weather that was expected at any moment’. Finally, Catherine told him like a nagging wife to take Joseph, whatever the weather.

  A splendid tent was erected for the two monarchs to view the display of horsemanship while the other spectators, including the King of Poland’s nephew Prince Stanislas Poniatowski, to whom we owe this story, watched on horseback. There was a distant roar as Prince Potemkin, at the head of several thousand horsemen, galloped into view. The Prince raised his sword to order the charge when suddenly the horse buckled under the weight of his bulk and collapsed, ‘like a centaur on to its hindlegs’. However, he kept his seat during this embarrassing moment and gave his command. The regiment began its charge from a league away and, with the earth trembling, stopped right in front of the imperial tent, in perfect formation. ‘I’ve never seen anything like this done before by a cavalry regiment,’ said Joseph. His comments on Potemkin’s mount were not recorded.8

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  On the 30th, Catherine and Joseph left Mogilev and headed in the same carriage to Smolensk, where they temporarily parted. Joseph, with only five attendants, headed off to see Moscow. Catherine was not far from Potemkin’s birthplace, Chizhova. There is a legend that Potemkin invited Catherine to visit the village, where with his nephew, Vasily Engelhardt, one of her aides-de-camp and now owner of the village, he greeted her at the gates and showed her the wooden bathhouse where he was born. The well was henceforth named for Catherine. They then split up – the Prince joined Joseph on the road to Moscow, while the Empress returned to Petersburg. ‘My good friend,’ she wrote to Potemkin, ‘it’s empty without you.’9

  Joseph could not understand Potemkin. ‘Prince de Potemkin wants to go to Moscow to explain everything to me,’ Joseph told his mother. ‘His credit is at an all-time high. Her Majesty even named him at table as her true student…He has not shown any particularly impressive views so far,’ added Joseph, but ‘I don’t doubt he’ll show himself on the journey.’ But, once again, Joseph was confounded. While he ceaselessly gave pedantic perorations of his own views, in between brisk expeditions of inspection, Pot
emkin drifted away into silent reveries. The Prince wanted Joseph’s alliance, but he was no sycophant and was not as impressed as he should have been to have the head of the House of Habsburg in his company. Once in Moscow, Joseph told ‘very dear mother’ that Potemkin ‘explains to me the necessary’ about some sights but ‘to others I go alone’. It was entirely characteristic of Potemkin to doze in bed while the inspector–Emperor rose at dawn for more inspections. By the time they left, Joseph was indignant that Potemkin ‘very much took his ease. I’ve only seen him three times in Moscow and he hasn’t spoken to me about business at all.’ This man, he concluded, is ‘too indolent, too cool to put something into motion – and insouciant’.10

  On 18 June Joseph and Potemkin arrived in Petersburg, where the two sides began to explore what sort of friendship they wanted. At Tsarskoe Selo, Potemkin arranged a treat for the Comte de Falkenstein. He recruited Catherine’s English gardener from Hackney (originally from Hanover), the appropriately named Bush, to create a special tavern for the Emperor, who loved inns. When Baroness Dimsdale, the English wife of the doctor who inoculated the imperial family, visited a year later, the gardener proudly told her how he had a hung a sign outside the building on which he wrote ‘The Count Falkenstein Arms’. He himself wore a placard reading ‘Master of the Inn’. Joseph dined at the ‘Falkenstein Arms’ on boiled beef, soup, ham and the most ‘agreeable yet common Russian dishes’. One wonders if the humourless pedant got the joke.11