Catherine the Great & Potemkin

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  The Prince could insure himself against Paul only by changing the succession or by establishing a base outside Russia. He therefore pursued a different plan to discredit Paul once and for all – and possibly later remove him from the succession, leaving the throne to his son Alexander. When Potemkin heard that Paul’s suite included Prince Alexander Kurakin, another Prussophile enemy and Panin’s nephew, he asked the Austrians, via Cobenzl, to let him see the Cabinet Noir intercepts of Paul’s post. The Austrian secret services passed on to Potemkin what they gleaned from Paul’s contacts with Panin. The Prince was sure that he would catch Kurakin spying for the Prussians and therefore taint Tsarevich Paul.20

  Nikita Panin, ill as he was, knew that Kurakin’s post would be opened, so he arranged for Paul to keep in contact with his supporters at home via a third party, Pavel Bibikov, son of the general. The letter that was opened in early 1782 from Bibikov to Kurakin was a bombshell that, more than the Saldern Plot, ensured Paul’s exclusion from power for the rest of Catherine’s life. Bibikov described Catherine’s rule as ‘the horrible situation in the Motherland’ and criticized Potemkin, ‘Cyclops par excellence’ and ‘le borgne’, for ruining the army. ‘If he breaks his neck’, everything would return to its ‘natural order’.

  Catherine was alarmed and angry. Bibikov was immediately arrested. Catherine personally wrote out the questions for his interrogation by Sheshkovsky. Bibikov’s excuse was that he was just unhappy at his regiment being stationed in the south. Catherine sent the results to the Prince, while ordering Bibikov tried in the Senate’s Secret Expedition. The trial in camera found him guilty of treason and, under military law, of defaming his commander, Potemkin, and sentenced him to death.

  The Prince’s decency came into play. Even though Paul’s circle had actually discussed breaking his neck, Potemkin asked Catherine for mercy on 15 April 1782: ‘Even if virtue produces jealousy, it’s nothing still compared to all the good it grants to those who serve it…You have probably pardoned him already…He’ll probably overcome his dissolute inclinations and become a worthy subject of Your Majesty and I will add this grace to your other favours to me.’ Admitting he was terrified of Potemkin’s vengeance, Bibikov wept under interrogation. He offered to apologize publicly.

  ‘He shouldn’t be afraid of my vengeance,’ Potemkin wrote to Catherine, ‘in so far as, among the abilities granted to me by God, that inclination is missing. I don’t even want the triumph of a public apology…He’ll never find any example of my vengeance, to anybody, in my entire life.’21 This was true – but, more than that, it displayed the statesman’s measured moderation: he never pushed things too far and therefore never provoked an unwanted reaction.

  Bibikov and Kurakin, recalled from Paul’s suite in Paris, were exiled to the south. When the Heir returned to Petersburg at the end of the journey, his influence was broken, his allies scattered. Even his mother disdained her tiresome, unbalanced son and his wife as ‘Die schwere Bagage’ – the heavy luggage.22 ‘Prince Potemkin is happier’, Cobenzl told Joseph, ‘than I’ve ever seen him.’23

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  The secret Austrian treaty was soon tested – in the Crimea, the key to the Black Sea, the last Tartar stronghold and the nub of Potemkin’s policy of southern expansionism. In May, the Prince headed beyond to Moscow ‘for a short trip’, visiting some estates. While he was on the road, the Turks again backed a Crimean rebellion against Catherine’s puppet Khan, Shagin Giray, who was driven out once more, along with the Russian resident. The Khanate dissolved into anarchy.

  The Empress sent a courier after the Prince. ‘My dear friend, come back as soon as possible,’ she wrote on 3 June 1782, adding wearily that they would have to honour their promise to reinstate the Khan – even though it was the third time they had done so. She told Potemkin the news that the British Admiral Rodney had defeated Admiral Joseph de Grasse’s French fleet at the Battle of the Saints in the Caribbean on 1/12 April, which slightly alleviated Britain’s plight as America won its freedom. In the Crimea, she realized that her policy of propping up Shagin Giray was obsolete but the delicate question of what to do depended on the Powers of Europe – and Potemkin. ‘We could decide it all in half an hour together,’ she told her consort, ‘but now I don’t know where to find you. I ask you to hurry with your arrival because nothing scares me more than to miss something or be wrong.’ Never was their partnership, and his equality, more clearly stated.24

  The Prince saw the Crimean tumult as a historic opportunity, because Britain and France remained distracted by war. He galloped back and almost bounded into town. He immediately sent this playfully Puckish letter to Sir James Harris in French, scrawled in his scratchy hand: ‘Vive la Grande Bretagne et Rodney; je viens d’arriver, mon cher Harris; devinez qui vous écrit and venez me voir tout de suite.’*

  Harris rushed through Tsarskoe Selo at midnight to visit ‘this extraordinary man who’, he told the new Foreign Secretary, his close friend Charles James Fox, ‘every day affords me new matter of amazement’. Sir James found Potemkin in a state of almost febrile ebullience. Serenissimus insisted on talking throughout the night, even though he had just finished ‘a journey of 3000 versts, which he had performed in 16 days, during which period he had slept only three times and, besides visiting several estates and every church he came near, he had been exposed to all the delays and tedious ceremonies of the military and civil honours which the Empress had ordered should be bestowed on him…yet he does not bear the smallest appearance of fatigue…and on our separation, I was certainly the more exhausted of the two’.25

  The reunited Prince and Empress resolved to reinstate Shagin Giray as Crimean khan but also to invoke the Austrian treaty in case it led to war with the Sublime Porte. Joseph replied so enthusiastically to ‘my Empress, my friend, my ally, my heroine’,26 that, while Potemkin organized the Russian military response to the Crimean crisis, Catherine took the opportunity to turn their Greek Project from a chimera into a policy. On 10 September 1782, Catherine proposed the Project to Joseph, who was shocked by its impracticality yet impressed by its vision. First, Catherine wanted to re-establish ‘the ancient Greek monarchy on the ruins…of the barbarian government that rules there now’ for ‘the younger of my grandsons, Grand Duke Constantine’. Then she wanted to create the Kingdom of Dacia, the Roman province that covered today’s Rumania, ‘a state independent of the three monarchies…under a Sovereign of Christian religion…and a person of loyalty on which the two Imperial Courts can rely…’. Cobenzl’s letters make clear Dacia was specifically understood to be Potemkin’s kingdom.

  Joseph’s reply was equally sweeping: he agreed to the Project in principle. In return he wanted the fortress of Khotin, part of Wallachia, and Belgrade. Venice would cede Istria and Dalmatia to him and get Morea, Cyprus and Crete in return. All this, he added, was impossible without French help – could France have Egypt? Only war and negotiation could decide the details – but he did not reject it.27

  Did Potemkin really believe that there would be a reborn Byzantine Empire ruled by Constantine, with himself as king of Dacia? The idea thrilled him, but he was always the master of the possible. The Dacian idea was realized in the creation of Rumania in the mid-nineteenth century, and Potemkin certainly planned to make that real. But he did not lose his head about it.28 During 1785 he discussed the Turks with the French Ambassador Ségur and claimed that he could take Istanbul, but insisted that the new Byzantium was just a ‘chimera’. It was all ‘nonsense’, he said. ‘It’s nothing.’ But then he mischievously suggested that three or four Powers could drive the Turks into Asia and deliver Egypt, the Archipelago, Greece, all Europe from the Ottoman yoke. Many years later Potemkin asked his reader, who was declaiming Plutarch, if he could go to Constantinople. The reader tactfully replied it was quite possible. ‘That is enough,’ exclaimed Potemkin, ‘if anyone should tell me I could not go thither, I would shoot myself in the head.’29 He
was always flexible – it was he who suggested in September 1788 that Constantine could be made king of Sweden, a long way from Tsargrad.30 So he wished it to serve its strategic purpose and to be as real as he could make it.

  Catherine the Great herself settles any argument about Potemkin’s contribution to the Austrian alliance and the Greek Project. ‘The system with Vienna’s court’, she wrote later, ‘is your achievement.’31

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  On 7 August 1782, the Empress and Serenissimus attended the unveiling of Falconet’s mammoth statue of Peter the Great – the Bronze Horseman – that still stands in Senate Square in Petersburg. It was a statement in stone of their ambitions to emulate the achievements of Peter, who had succeeded so brilliantly in the Baltic but failed in the south.

  The Prince ordered his nephew, Major-General Samoilov, to begin preparatory action to restore order in the Crimea, but he decided to go south himself and conduct the main part. This trip marks the end of the domestic era of Potemkin and Catherine’s partnership and the beginning of his time of colossal achievement. From now on, Catherine understood that they were to be apart as much as they were together. This was his path to greatness and contentment, although, as she sweetly admitted to him while he was far away, ‘My dear master, I dislike it so much when you are not here by my side.’ On 1 September 1782, the Prince left St Petersburg to subdue the Crimea.32

  Skip Notes

  * ‘Long live Great Britain and Rodney. I have just arrived, my dear Harris. Guess who is writing to you and come and see me immediately!’

  17

  POTEMKIN’S PARADISE: THE CRIMEA

  I now steal captives from the Persians Or at the Turks direct my arrows

  Gavrili Derzhavin, ‘Ode to Princess Felitsa’

  The Crimea was what Potemkin called ‘the wart’ on the end of Catherine’s nose – but it was to become his own Russian ‘paradise’. The peninsula itself was not only dazzlingly and lushly beautiful but it was also a cosmopolitan gem, an ancient entrepôt that controlled the Black Sea. The Ancient Greeks, Goths, Huns, Byzantines, Khazars, Karaim Jews, Georgians, Armenians, Genoese and Tartars, who came later, were all just visitors there, trading and dealing, in a peninsula that seemed to belong to no one race. For a Classicist like the Prince, there were the ruins of Khersoneses and the mythical temple of Iphigenia, the daughter of Agamemnon. But he was most interested in the Crimea’s strategic importance and its history as the Mongol stronghold that had terrorized Russia for three centuries.

  The Tartar Khanate of the Crimea, known in the West as Crim Tartary, was a state that seemed archaic even in 1782 – the last Mongol outpost. Crimea’s Giray dynasty were the second family of the Ottoman Empire because they were descended from Genghis Khan himself, which was much more distinguished a descent than the House of Othman. If Rome and Byzantium represented two of the three international traditions of imperial legitimacy, the blood of Genghis Khan was the third. The family owned estates in Anatolia, where the Ottomans conveniently imprisoned restless potential successors in a sort of Giray Cage. If ever the Ottomans became extinct, it was understood that the Genghizid Girays would succeed them. They were always more allies than subjects.

  The Khanate had been founded in 1441 when Haci Giray broke away from the Golden Horde and made himself khan of the Crimea and the shores of the Black Sea. His successor Mengli Giray acknowledged the ultimate suzerainty of the Ottoman Emperor, and from then on the two states existed in a tense, respectful alliance. The Tartars guarded the Black Sea, defended Turkey’s northern borders and provided a stream of blonde Slavic slaves to sell to the fleshpots and rowing-galleys of Constantinople. Between 1601 and 1655, it has been estimated, they kidnapped over 150,000 slaves. Their armies of 50,000–100,000 horsemen had the run of the eastern steppes, raiding into Muscovy whenever they needed more slaves to fill their markets. They bore six-foot-long square-shaped bows, with arrows two feet long; muskets and round, bejewelled shields, with pistols studded with lapis and emerald. Until that century, the Genghizid khans received tribute from the tsars of Russia and kings of Poland. The Girays believed their grandeur was second to none. ‘His imperial star rose above the glorious horizon,’ one khan wrote in an inscription in the Bakhchisaray Palace, where the Khans resided in their Seraglio like miniature Great Turks, guarded by 2,100 Sekbans, Janissaries from Constantinople. ‘His beautiful Crimean throne gave brilliant illumination to the whole world.’

  For 300 years, Tartary had been one of the most important states of eastern Europe, its cavalry supposedly the best in Europe. It was far larger than just the Crimea: at its apogee in the sixteenth century, it had ruled from Transylvania and Poland to Astrakhan and Kazan, and halfway to Moscow. Even in Potemkin’s day, the Khanate ruled from the Kuban steppes in the east to Bessarabia in the west, from the tip of the Crimea to the Zaporogian Sech – ‘all that territory that separates the Russian Empire from the Black Sea’. Often allied with Lithuania against Muscovy, in the sixteenth century Tartar khans had even burned the suburbs of Moscow.1 But their state was fatally flawed. The khans were not hereditary but elective. Beneath the Girays were the murzas, Tartar dynasties, also descended from the Mongols, who elected one Giray as khan and another, not necessarily his son, as his heir-apparent, the Kalgai khan. Furthermore many of the khan’s subjects were unbiddable Nogai Tartar nomads. It was only in times of war that the khan could really command.2

  Baron de Tott, French adviser to the Ottomans, was seconded to the Crimea, where he rode, hawked and went greyhound coursing with the Khan, who was always accompanied by 6,000 horsemen. When the Sublime Porte declared war on Russia in 1768, Khan Kirim Giray, accompanied by Tott, galloped out of the Crimea at the head of an army of 100,000 to attack the Russian army on the Bessarabian–Polish border, where young Potemkin served. When Kirim Giray died (possibly of poisoning), the Tartars halted in Bessarabia to install the new Khan Devlet Giray, and the Baron was one of the last to witness the primitive magnificence of this Genghizid monarchy: ‘Dressed in a cap loaded with two aigrettes enriched with diamonds, his bow and quiver flung across his body, preceded by his guards and several led horses whose heads were ornamented with plumes of feathers, followed by the standard of the Prophet and accompanied by all his Court, he repaired to his Palace where in the hall of the Divan, seated on his throne, he received the homage of all the grandees.’ This noble scene of nomadic warriorship was incongruously accompanied by ‘a numerous orchestra and a troop of actors and buffoons’. When he set off to war, the Khan resided in a tent like his Mongol forefathers ‘decorated on the inside with crimson’.3

  The initial raids were impressive but the Russo-Turkish War was a disaster for Crim Tartary. Devlet Giray also perished in his crimson-lined tent and was replaced with a lesser man. Tott was recalled to Constantinople, but unfortunately the Tartar army remained on the Danube with the main Ottoman armies, so that it was not there in 1771 when Vasily Dolgoruky occupied the Crimea. As we saw, Pugachev and the diplomatic conjuncture prevented the Russians keeping all their conquests in 1774. But Catherine, shrewdly advised by Potemkin, insisted in the Treaty of Kuchuk-Kainardzhi that Tartary be made independent of the Sultan, who would still keep nominal religious control as caliph. This ‘independence’ brought further ruin.

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  Crimea’s tragedy had a face and a name. Shagin Giray, the Kalgai Khan or, as Catherine put it, Tartar ‘Dauphin’, had led the Crimean delegation to St Petersburg in 1771. ‘A sweet character,’ she told Voltaire, ‘he writes Arabic poems…he’s going to come to my circle on Sundays after dinner when he is allowed to enter to watch the girls dance…’. Shagin was not only handsome but had been educated in Venice. Thus he became the Russian candidate for khan when the Crimeans agreed to their independence from Istanbul in the Treaty of Karasubazaar in November 1772. That year, Shagin left the capital with 20,000 roubles and a gold sword.4 However,
the Ottomans never accepted the independence of the Crimea, despite agreeing to it in both the Treaties of Kuchuk-Kainardzhi and Ainalikawak. They handed over Kinburn on the Dnieper and two of their forts on the Sea of Azov. But they kept the powerful fortress of Ochakov from which to threaten the Russians, who occupied the land between the Dnieper and the Bug.

  In April 1777, Shagin Giray managed to get himself elected khan. He had been far too impressed with the Russian Court. His veneer of Western culture did not long conceal his political ineptitude, military incompetence and unrestrained sadism. Like an Islamic Joseph II but without his philanthropy, Shagin set about creating an enlightened despotism, backed by a mercenary army led by a Polish nobleman. Meanwhile the Russians had settled 1,200 of their Greek allies from the war in their town of Yenikale on the Sea of Azov: these ‘Albanians’, as they were called, soon argued with the Tartars. When the Ottomans sent a fleet with another ex-khan on board to replace Shagin, the Tartars rebelled and Shagin fled again. In February 1778, Potemkin ordered yet another operation, while the Ottomans comically declared that they could prove Shagin was an infidel because he ‘sleeps on a bed, sits on a chair and does not pray according to the correct manner’.5 The restored Khan, so deluded about his political abilities that according to Potemkin he thought he was a Crimean Peter the Great, murdered his enemies so savagely that he appalled even the Russians. Catherine hoped the Khan had learned his lesson.