Catherine the Great & Potemkin

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  Meanwhile to the east of the Crimea and the Kuban, south of the Caucasus mountains, he conducted negotiations with two Georgian kings about a Russian protectorate and with a Persian satrap, along with Armenian rebels, about fostering an independent Armenian state. On top of all this, an epidemic of plague struck the Crimea, brought in from Constantinople, so quarantines had to be enforced. ‘I order precautions against it – repeat the basics, inspire hygiene, visit the plague hospitals thus setting an example,’ Potemkin wrote to Bezborodko. These were just some of the myriad projects Potemkin was conducting at this time. ‘Only God knows how I’ve worn myself out.’ As if this was not enough for one man, he monitored the Powers of Europe – and coped with Catherine.29 He chided her: ‘You’ve always shown me favour…so do not decline the one I need most – take care of your health.’

  Frederick the Great now attempted to ruin Catherine’s plans by egging on the French to stop her. Potemkin dared the old Prussian ‘huckster…to send French troops here – we’d teach them a lesson in the Russian way’. King Gustavus of Sweden, who hoped to emulate his hero Alexander the Great, insisted on visiting Catherine, looking for chances to take advantage of Russian trouble with Turkey to reclaim Sweden’s lost Baltic Empire. But his visit was delayed when his horse threw him at a military parade and he broke his arm. ‘What a clumsy hero,’ Catherine chuckled to Potemkin. Alexander the Great never made such a fool of himself. By the time Gustavus arrived for his visit, the Crimean cake was baked and eaten.

  The Comte de Vergennes, the French Foreign Minister, sought out the Austrian envoy to Paris to co-ordinate a reaction to Russian plans. Joseph II, pushed to a decision by Catherine and afraid of missing out on Ottoman gains, suddenly rallied and informed the horrified Vergennes of the Russo-Austrian Treaty. Without support from its ally Austria, an exhausted France lacked the will to act. As for Britain, relieved to have escaped its American quicksand, Lord Grantham told Harris that if ‘France means to be quiet about the Turks…why should we meddle? No time to begin a fresh broil.’

  Joseph’s alliance proved decisive. ‘Your prediction has come true, my cheerful clever friend,’ the Empress told her consort. ‘Appetite comes with eating.’ So it looked as if the partners would get away with it.30

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  Potemkin was so embroiled in his many activities that he now ceased writing his usual letters to Catherine. She fretted and wrote repeatedly throughout May and June, snapping, ‘While you complain there’s no news from me, I thought it’s me who had no news from you for a long time.’ The two were getting irritated with each other, as they always did during political crises. She wanted to know if the Khan had left the Crimea so that the Tartars could take the oath of allegiance and she could publish her Manifesto on the annexation.

  Potemkin, toiling in Kherson, was trying to manage the departure of Shagin, who was now delaying the enterprise despite his 200,000 rouble pension. The Tartars would not co-operate while the Khan was still there. Even though he sent his baggage to Petrovsk, the Khan’s officers were discouraging the mullahs from trusting Russia. Pavel Potemkin and Suvorov at last reported from the distant Kuban that the Nogai nomads were ready to take the oath to Catherine. Everything had to be co-ordinated. The Prince was determined that the annexation should be bloodless and at least appear to be the will of the Crimean people. Finally at the end of May, Potemkin wrote that he was leaving Kherson for the Crimea: ‘Goodbye Matushka, darling…The Khan will be off in a trice.’

  The Prince arrived in the Crimea and set up camp at Karasubazaar, ready to administer the oath on 28 June, Catherine’s accession day. But it dragged on. While working frantically and exhausting himself, the Prince presented a picture of Oriental languor. ‘I saw him in the Crimea,’ wrote one of his officers, ‘lying on a sofa surrounded by fruits and apparently oblivious of all care – yet amid all the unconcern Russia conquered the peninsula.’31

  Catherine veered between longing for Potemkin and despairing of him. ‘Neither I nor anyone knows where you are.’ In early June, she missed him. ‘I often deplore that you are there and not here because I feel helpless without you.’ A month later, she was angry: ‘You can imagine how anxious I must be having no news from you for more than five weeks…I expected the occupation of the Crimea by mid-May at the latest and now it’s mid-July and I know no more about it than the Pope of Rome.’32 Then she began to worry that he was dying of the plague. Presumably Potemkin had decided to wait until he could lay the entire Crimea and Kuban at Catherine’s feet.

  Across the ancient Crimean Khanate, the murzas and mullahs gathered in their finest robes to take the oath on the Koran to an Orthodox empress over a thousand miles away. Potemkin administered the oath himself, first to the clergy, then to the rest. The most striking sight was in the Kuban far to the east. On the fixed day, 6,000 Tartar tents of the Nogai Horde were pitched out on the Eysk steppe. Thousands of tough little Mongol horses cantered around the encampments. Russian soldiers were casually vigilant. Shagin’s abdication was read to the Nogai, who then took the oath to the Empress in front of Suvorov. They returned to their Hordes, who also recited the oath. Then the feasting began: 100 cattle, 800 rams were cooked and eaten. The Nogai drank vodka – because wine was banned by the Koran. After many toasts and shouts of hurrah, the Cossacks and Nogai competed in horse races. Then the Nogai, having lost their freedom 600 years after Genghis Khan despatched his Hordes westwards, wandered away.33

  On 10 July, the Prince broke his silence to the Empress: ‘In three days, I will congratulate you with the Crimea. All the notables have already sworn, now all the rest will follow.’ On 20/31 July, Catherine received Potemkin’s report that the Crimean Tartars and the two Nogai Hordes had taken the oath. She was so relieved and worn out by the anticipation that she replied coolly, but, as it sank in and she received Potemkin’s explanation, she appreciated his achievement. ‘What a lot of glorious deeds have been accomplished in a short time.’ His letters were immediately filled with his ideas for towns, ports and ships, laced with Classical references to his new territories. His ebullience was always infectious. When he wrote that the cowardly rumours about the plague were spread by poltroons in ‘Spa and Paris’, Catherine laughed at last.34

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  A few days later, Serenissimus pulled another golden rabbit out of the hat: in the Caucasus, the Kingdom of Georgia accepted Russian protection. The Caucasus, the isthmus between the Black and Caspian Seas, was a mountaineous patchwork of kingdoms and principalities, dominated by the empires around them – Russia, Turkey and Persia. In the north-west, Potemkin had just annexed the Kuban, ruled by the Crimeans. In the foothills, Russian generals struggled to control the wild Moslem mountaineers in Chechnya and Daghestan. South of the mountains, the Persian and Turkish empires divided the region among themselves. There, the two Orthodox Georgian kingdoms, Kartli-Kacheti and Imeretia, were almost mythical or Biblical in their romantic ferocity, so it was entirely appropriate that their tsars were named respectively Hercules and Solomon.

  Hercules (Heraclius, or Erakle in Georgian), a remarkable empire-builder, seemed to be the last of the medieval knights alive and well in the century of Voltaire. The name suited the man. Scion of the Bagratid dynasty that provided Georgian monarchs for almost a thousand years, he was a warrior–king who owed his throne to his fighting for the Shah of Persia in India and had managed to create a mini-empire in the backyards of Persia and Turkey. Already an old man, ‘of middle size, with a long face, large eyes and small beard, he had spent his youth’, a traveller remarked, ‘at the Court of Nadir Shah where he contracted a fondness for Persian customs…’. Hercules was ‘renowned for his courage and military skill. When on horseback he always has a pair of loaded pistols at his girdle and, if the enemy is near, a musket flying over a shoulder…’. The other Georgian Tsar, Solomon of Imeretia, was just as striking for, repeatedly overthrown and then restored, h
e had ‘lived like a wild man for sixteen years in caverns and holes and frequently, by his personal courage, escaped assassination’. He too lived with a musket over his shoulder.35

  When the Russians went to war in 1768, Catherine had helped Hercules and Solomon but abandoned them after 1774 to the vengeance of Shah and Sultan. Potemkin was emboldened by his Austrian alliance and decided to increase the pressure on the Ottomans by talking to the Georgians. He corresponded with Hercules, inquiring if he was now at peace with Solomon: he wanted both kingdoms for Russia.

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  On 31 December 1782, King Hercules told the ‘Merciful and Serene Prince’ that ‘I am entrusting myself, my children and my Orthodox nation’ to Russia. Serenissimus ordered his cousin, who commanded the Caucasus corps, to conduct negotiations. On 24 July 1783, Pavel Potemkin signed the Treaty of Georgievsk with Hercules on the Prince’s behalf.36

  Serenissimus, still encamped at Karasubazaar in the Crimea, was delighted. His Classical-cum-Orthodox exuberance at the news of another magnificent present to the Empress was irresistible:

  Lady Matushka, my foster-mother, the Georgia business is also brought to an end. Has any other Sovereign so illuminated an epoch as you have? But it is not just brilliance. You have attached the territories, which Alexander and Pompey just glanced at, to the baton of Russia, and Kherson of Taurida [Crimea] – the source of our Christianity and thus of our humanity – is already in the hands of its daughter.*2 There’s something mystic about it. You have destroyed the Tartar Horde – the tyrant of Russia in old times and its devastator in recent ones. Today’s new border promises peace to Russia, jealousy to Europe and fear to the Ottoman Porte. So write down this annexation, unempurpled with blood, and order your historians to prepare much ink and much paper.37

  Catherine was impressed. Thanking him for his achievements, she ratified the treaty, which confirmed Hercules’ titles, borders and right to coin his own currency. In September Pavel Potemkin built a road out of a bridlepath and galloped in an eight-horse carriage over the Caucasus to Tiflis (now Tbilisi). In November, two Russian battalions entered the capital. The Prince began to supervise the building of forts on Russia’s new border while two Georgian tsareviches, sons of Hercules, set off to live at the cosmopolitan Court of Potemkin.38

  And there was more. The failure of Voinovich’s Caspian adventure two years earlier had not discouraged Potemkin’s plans for an anti-Ottoman alliance with Persia. Bezborodko, one of the few who understood Potemkin’s geopolitical schemes, explained that the Prince planned not only this eastern version of the Austrian alliance. He had persuaded Catherine, in the Crimean rescript, to authorize him to push for the Caspian to create two other principalities: one Armenian (today’s Armenia) and another on the Caspian seashores (today’s Azerbaijan) that might be ruled by Shagin Giray, the deposed Crimean Khan.39

  By early 1784, Potemkin was negotiating with the Persian Khan in Isfahan about whether he might also join the Empire, giving him a chance to found his Armenian kingdom. ‘Armenia raises its hands to the sacred throne of Your Imperial Majesty asking for deliverance from the Aga’s yoke,’ declared Potemkin to the Empress.40 Negotiations with Persian potentates, the Khans of Shusha and Goya, and the Armenians of the Karabak, continued well into 1784.*3 Potemkin sent an envoy to Isfahan, but the Khan died and the envoy came home. Ultimately, the Persian–Armenian Project led to nothing. For now, his gains were substantial enough.

  Catherine was delighted and praised him as an empress, lover and friend: ‘For all the labours exerted by you and the boundless care of my affairs, I cannot sufficiently express my recognition to you; you yourself know how sensitive I am to merit and yours are outstanding, just as my friendship and love for you are. Let God give you health and ever greater powers of body and soul.’41

  In late August 1783, the Prince collapsed with a dangerous fever. Exhausted by his massive projects, perpetual travel, proximity to plague and bad water, Potemkin lay close to death in a pretty Tartar cottage amid the verdant pastures of Karasubazaar.

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  Potemkin could not rest – but his health improved in mid-September. Europe still rumbled at Russia’s achievement. As his fever ebbed and flared up again, he inspected Russian forces. In what became a pattern, even a tradition, Catherine, Bezborodko and the ambassadors followed every spasm back in Petersburg. When he moved to the regional capital of the south, Kremenchuk, away from plague-ridden Crimea and Kherson, Catherine, ever the concerned wife, wrote, ‘You never take care of yourself while recovering. Just do me this favour, for once remember the importance of your health: the well-being of the Empire and my glory.’ She knew that the conquest and development of the south depended on him: ‘The most important enterprise in the world will turn into nothing without you. I praise your moving to Kremenchuk but this should not be done in the very depth of dangerous illness, I was horrified to hear you had covered 300 versts in such a state.’42

  The two Russian imperialists savoured their success. Potemkin lost himself in romantic neo-Classical dreams, while Catherine reacted with crude, almost Stalinesque satisfaction: ‘Upon the envy of Europe, I look quite calmly – let them jest while we do our business.’ She reaffirmed his permanence: ‘Know that I am committed to you for a century.’43 To show it, she allotted 100,000 roubles to build him a new house that was to become the Taurida Palace.44

  He could not stop working. He knew that the Nogai Hordes would always create instability in the Kuban, so in a move that foreshadowed later stains on Russian history he drew up a plan to move the nomads and resettle them between the Volga and the Urals. The rumours reached the Nogai. Meanwhile that irritating Genghizid popinjay, Shagin Giray, lingered in the Taman and kept in contact with the Nogai Hordes. Perhaps encouraged by him, these had barely left Suvorov’s barbecued banquet on the steppe than they massacred their pro-Russian murzas. The energetic Suvorov immediately pursued the rebels and slaughtered them on 1 October.45

  The Russian Ambassador to the Porte was Potemkin’s university friend Yakov Bulgakov, who now monitored the Ottoman reaction while negotiating a trade agreement. He reported that the Turks ‘won’t quarrel over the Crimea if no new circumstance comes from Europe’. The final Treaty of Versailles ended the War of American Independence on 23 August/3 September, but it was too late. Prussia and France tried to raise some resistance and, in late September, Catherine still expected an Ottoman declaration of war ‘at any minute’, but Joseph had held firm against Vergennes and Frederick.46 The Kaiser even acclaimed ‘the success of Prince de Potemkin’ to the Empress: ‘I know very well the value and difficulty in finding such good and loyal serviteurs like him and how rare it is in our profession to find someone who understands us.’ On 28 December 1783, the Turks implicitly recognized the loss of the Crimea in the new convention of Ainalikawak, negotiated by Bulgakov.47

  Letters and praise poured into Potemkin’s Chancellery. It was true that he had now ‘risen to the highest degree of power that Sovereigns accord to individuals’, as his general Igelstrom wrote to him.48 More than that, ‘what the centuries had not completed, what Peter I had not managed’, wrote the writer Glinka, ‘this giant of his time was able to achieve’.49 Catherine missed him most of all, writing her simplest confirmation of their partnership in early October: ‘Let God make you better and return here. Honestly when I am without you, I often feel I am without hands.’ The Prince replied that ‘Thank God, I get better every hour…and when I’m fully recovered, I’m coming to see my dear matushka.’50

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  Prince Potemkin returned to Petersburg in late November 1783 to find courtiers hostile to him in paroxyms of jealousy. His ally Bezborodko was beleaguered, so Potemkin defended him, only to find himself beset by enemies. ‘The envy of many’, observed Bezborodko, grateful for Potemkin’s support, ‘is clear.’ This took the form of an intrigue to disc
redit Serenissimus.

  The Empress had been told that the outbreaks of plague in the south were somehow due to Potemkin’s negligence. She was sensitive on the subject, after Moscow’s Plague-Riot of 1770. There were allegations that Italian settlers arriving to farm the southern steppes had died because there were no houses for them. Both the allegations were false – he had worked especially hard to limit the plague, and had succeeded. It must have been depressing to achieve so much and travel so far only to find he had to fight his corner on his return. The plot, according to Bezborodko, was hatched by the Navy Minister, Ivan Chernyshev, who had most reason to resent Serenissimus’ success because Grand Admiral Potemkin was building his own Black Sea fleet outside the remit of the Navy College. Princess Dashkova, back from her travels, and even Lanskoy were somehow involved too. These accusations led to a row between the partners and a coldness descended over these two proud statesmen.51

  Potemkin stopped calling on Catherine. Lev Engelhardt, another cousin from Smolensk who had just joined the Prince’s staff as an adjutant, left a graphic account of this time. Usually the road, known as Millionaya (Millionaire’s Row), in front of Potemkin’s house adjoining the Winter Palace was so crowded with carriages and petitioners that it was impossible to pass. But now, at the height of his success, it was deserted. His enemies rejoiced.