Catherine the Great & Potemkin

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

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  On 2 February 1784, Serenissimus woke up late as usual. His valet had placed a little envelope with the imperial seal beside his bed. The Empress, who had been up since seven, had typically ordered that the Prince should not be woken. Potemkin read the letter and called for his secretary, Vasily Popov. ‘Read!’, he said. Popov ran into the anteroom, where adjutant Engelhardt was on duty: ‘Go and congratulate the Prince. He’s promoted to field-marshal.’ Engelhardt went into the bedroom and congratulated his master. The Prince–Field-Marshal jumped out of bed, threw on a greatcoat, wrapped his pink silk scarf round his neck and went off to see the Empress. He was also raised to President of the College of War. Furthermore, on his recommendation, the Empress created the province of Tauris, the Classical name for the Crimea, and added it to Potemkin’s vast viceroyalty of New Russia. Within two hours, his apartments were full. Millionaya was blocked by carriages again. The courtiers who had been coldest grovelled the lowest.52 On 10 February, Catherine dined as Potemkin’s guest in one of his nieces’ houses.

  The Prince impulsively decided he wanted to see Constantinople, so he asked Bulgakov: ‘What if I come as a guest to you from the Crimea by ship? Seriously I want to know if it is possible.’ Potemkin’s request was not merely romantic impulse – though much of it was his desire to see the city of Caesars. He knew now what he wanted to do, how much he wanted to build in the south, and for that he needed time and peace. He surely wanted to go to Tsargrad to negotiate this peace with the Sultan himself. Ambassador Bulgakov must have dreaded the very prospect. On 15 March, he replied from Istanbul that it would be exceedingly complicated. ‘They think’, he explained, ‘that you are our Grand Vizier.’53 Potemkin never saw Constantinople – but his destiny was in the south. From now on, he planned ‘to pass the first four or five months of each year in his provinces’.54 In mid-March, the Prince left St Petersburg again. There were cities to build, fleets to float, kingdoms to found.

  Skip Notes

  *1 One token of Harris’s favour with Catherine and Potemkin can still be seen in London in the form of a gorgeous bauble. When Harris left, she presented him with a chandelier created in Potemkin’s glass factories. Harris’s descendant, the 6th Earl of Malmesbury, recently gave this to the Skinner’s Company of the City of London where it now hangs in the Outer Hall.

  *2 Potemkin the Orthodox revelled in possessing the very place, the ancient town of Khersoneses in the Crimea, where Vladimir, Grand Prince of Kiev, had been baptized in 988, the moment when Christianity reached the land of Rus.

  *3 The Armenians of Nagorno-Karabak were still fighting to escape the Moslem control of the Republic of Azerbaijan and join the Republic of Armenia during a vicious war in the early 1990s.

  PART SIX

  The Co-Tsar

  1784–1786

  18

  EMPEROR OF THE SOUTH

  Is it not you who put to flight

  The mighty hordes of vulturous neighbours

  And from vast empty regions made

  Inhabitable towns and cornfields

  And covered the Black Sea with ships

  And shook the earth’s core with your thunder?

  Gavrili Derzhavin, The Waterfall

  ‘Every hour I encountered some fresh, fantastic instance of Prince Potemkin’s Asiatic peculiarities,’ wrote the Comte de Damas, who observed the energetic and creative way the viceroy of the south worked in the late 1780s. ‘He would move a guberniya [province], demolish a town with a view to building it somewhere else, form a new colony or a new industrial centre, and change the administration of a province, all in a spare half-hour before giving his whole attention to the arrangement of a ball or a fête…’.1 This was how Westerners saw the Prince – a wizardly satrap ordering cities as he commissioned ball-dresses for his mistresses. They always presumed that ‘barbaric’ Russians could never really do anything properly, not like Germans or Frenchmen, so that Potemkin’s work must surely be flawed. When it turned out that Potemkin did do things properly and that his achievements appeared almost miraculous in their imagination and execution, jealous Westerners and Russian enemies propagated the big lie of his sham ‘Potemkin Villages’.

  The reality of Potemkin’s achievements in the south, in the fifteen years allotted to him, was remarkable. ‘Attempts have been made to ridicule the first foundations of towns and colonies,’ wrote one of his earliest biographers. ‘Yet such establishments are not the less entitled to our admiration…Time has justified our observations. Listen to the travellers who have seen Kherson and Odessa…’.2 The so-called ‘Potemkin Villages’ are cities today with millions of inhabitants.

  Russia underwent two massive leaps of expansion in the south: the reigns of Ivan the Terrible, who annexed the Khanates of Astrakhan and Kazan, and of Catherine the Great. Potemkin was, as Pushkin and others recognized, the mastermind and energy behind Catherine’s successes in the south. Potemkin did not invent these policies: as the Russian historian Kliuchevsky put it, colonization is ‘the basic fact of Russian history’. But Potemkin was unique in combining the creative ideas of an entrepreneur with the force of a soldier and the foresight of a statesman. He also brought the south to the north: while, under Panin, Russia pursued the Northern System, under Potemkin the south was Russia’s foreign policy.

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  The Prince became the Governor-General (namestvo) of New Russia, Azov, Saratov, Astrakhan and the Caucasus soon after rising to favour, but in the late 1770s and certainly after the annexation of the Crimea, he became the effective co-ruler of the Russian Empire. Just as Diocletian saw that the Roman Empire was so vast that it required Emperors of the East and West, so Catherine let Potemkin run the south and control it absolutely. Potemkin had grown since 1774 – in stature as well as girth. He was made for the wide open steppes of the south and he could not be confined to Court. Petersburg was now too small for the both of them.

  Potemkin’s power was both vertical and horizontal, for he was in charge of the army at the College of War and commander-in-chief of all irregular forces, especially the Cossacks. When he began to build the Black Sea Fleet, it reported not to the Admiralty in Petersburg but to him as Grand Admiral. However, most of all, his power depended on his own personality, the prestige of his successes, such as the Crimea, and his ability to create ideas and force their execution – and no longer just on his closeness to Catherine.

  Serenissimus deliberately ruled his Viceroyalty – the names and borders of the provinces changed but, essentially, they comprised all the new lands annexed between 1774 and 1783, from the River Bug in the west to the Caspian Sea in the east, from the mountains of the Caucasus, and the Volga across most of the Ukraine almost as far as Kiev – like an emperor. It was unique for a Russian tsar, such as Catherine, to delegate so much power to a consort – but the relationship between them was unparalleled.3

  Serenissimus set up his own Court in the south that rivalled and complemented Catherine’s in the north. Like a tsar, he cared for the poor folk, disdained the nobility, and granted ranks and estates in his lands. Potemkin travelled with a royal entourage; he was greeted at towns by all the nobles and townsfolk; his arrival was marked by the firing of cannons and the giving of balls. But it went further than just the trimmings of royalty. When he issued his orders, he did so in the name of the Empress, but he also listed his endless titles and medals as a king might. His commands too were absolute: whether it was a gardener or an engineer, his subordinates usually had a military rank and their orders were military in style. ‘Equalling in his power the mightiest kings,’ recalled Wiegel, ‘I doubt even Napoleon was better obeyed.’4

  The Prince liked to appear majestically languid – as he is remembered in so many memoirs – but this was something of a pose. He ruined his health with the mammoth quantity of work he conducted. Probabl
y, he was more like a school swot who tries to appear to do no work while cramming all night. By the early 1780s, he governed through his own private Chancellery, which had at least fifty clerks in it, including specialists in French and Greek correspondence.5 He even had his own effective prime minister – the indefatigable Vasily Stepanovich Popov, whom he, and later the Empress, trusted absolutely. Like Potemkin, Popov gambled all night, slept half the day, never took off his uniform and was always ready even in the middle of the night to respond to the Prince’s famous call, usually from his bed, of ‘ “Vasily Stepanovich!’ All you heard was “Vasily Stepanovich!”.’6 If Popov was his chancellor, the equally tireless Mikhail Leontovich Faleev, a young merchant he met during the First Russo-Turkish War, became his quartermaster, contractor and collaborator in gargantuan works. His portrait shows the weary, shrewd blue eyes, slim, disciplined, tidy and handsome face of this most unusual Russian entrepreneur, wearing his blue coat and white ruffles. Potemkin had him ennobled and he amassed a great fortune but, unusually for merchant princes, Faleev was honoured and loved in the town he built with Serenissimus – Nikolaev. They were in constant correspondence.7

  Potemkin was in perpetual motion, except when paralysed by bouts of depression and fever. However many cities he founded, wherever he was, whether alone in a kibitka sledge, with the Chancellery hundreds of versts behind, or in a palace, the capital of this southern empire was the creative yet flawed and tormented figure of Potemkin himself.

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  Potemkin’s career began and ended with his love for the Cossacks. First he destroyed the Zaporogian Cossacks and then he recreated them by rebuilding their Host at the heart of the imperial army. On an island in the midst of the broad Dnieper river – hence their name ‘za-porogi’, ‘beyond the rapids’ – lived a unique republic of 20,000 martial men, who controlled a huge triangle of barren territory north of the Black Sea. The Zaporogians did not farm, because farming was done by slaves and these were freemen – the very word Cossack deriving from the old Turkic for freeman. But, like most Cossacks, their Sech was a brutal democracy which elected a hetman – or ataman – in wartime. They had their own laws: treason was punished by being sewn into a sack and tossed into the rapids. Murderers were buried alive in the cold embrace of the cadavers of their victims, to whom they were bound.

  They were unusual for Cossacks in many ways. They were as happy on their sixty-foot, reed-lined and oar-propelled boats – the chaiki or ‘seagulls’ – as on horseback. They were said to be the inventors of the first submarine, using sand as ballast and a wooden pipe through which to breathe. The Zaporogian Cossacks did not live with women. No female was allowed inside their sech or ‘clearing’ to preserve the military discipline they held paramount: ‘they were bachelors’, Lev Engelhardt explained, ‘like the Knights of Malta’.

  These ‘Boat Cossacks’ sported handlebar moustaches, shaven heads with one long ponytail, Turkish pantaloons with gold thread, silken cummerbunds, satin kaftans, high fur hats and turbans often with ostrich feathers and jewelled insignia. Their true profession was war. When they did not fight for themselves, they fought for others, sometimes as mercenaries – in the mid-seventeenth century, some Zaporogians were lent by the King of Poland to fight Spain at Dunkirk, under the Prince de Condé, and twice that century their fleet of almost 100 chaiki had raided Constantinople itself.

  The Cossacks had developed as freebooting guards of the Russian frontiers, but by 1774 their unruly independent Hosts were no longer needed to protect against the Turks – and the Sech stood in the way of Russia confronting the Tartars. The Ukrainian Cossacks under Mazeppa had abandoned Peter the Great and joined Charles XII of Sweden. Cossack raiders had started the Russo-Turkish War in 1768 and the Zaporogians had several times robbed Russian troops on the way to the front. Recently, the Yaik and Don Cossacks begat Pugachev. During the war, Potemkin had developed special links with the Sech – he was an honorary Zaporogian. Indeed, in May 1774, he wrote to his Cossack friends from Tsarskoe Selo, telling them of his rise to power and promising that ‘I have told the Sovereign about everything.’ Nonetheless, as soon as the Pugachev Rebellion was suppressed, he changed his tune, warned them to stop their plundering and recommended the liquidation of the Sech and the reorganization of all the Cossack Hosts. Indeed they were a proven liability to the Russian state – and to Potemkin’s plans to colonize and cultivate new territories.

  At dawn on 4 June 1775, Russian troops under Potemkin’s orders approached the Sech, surrounded it and ordered it to surrender or face destruction. The Sech that he called ‘the foolish rabble’ surrendered without resistance. Potemkin wrote Catherine’s Manifesto for her, which was published on 3 August 1775 – ‘all their violence should be cited – the reasons why such a harmful society will be destroyed’.8 The Zaporogians were not killed: only three leaders, including their wealthy Hetman Kalischevsky, were despatched to the Arctic monastery of Solovki on the White Sea. They were resettled as Astrakhan Cossacks, but many of them fled to fight for the Turks: Potemkin was to lure them back in the 1780s.9 Nor was the Sech alone: the Yaik Host was moved and renamed; Don Cossacks were reformed too and brought under Potemkin’s direct control: he appointed their new hetman and the committee that would manage their civil affairs.10 The overmighty Don Hetman, Efremov, was arrested, though Potemkin protected him and his family.11

  Potemkin immediately suggested that the loyal Zaporogians be formed into special regiments. Catherine feared the Cossacks after Pugachev, so he bided his time, but he built a Cossack flotilla on the Caspian and Azov Seas.12 He treated the Cossacks so kindly that noblemen grumbled that he was in love with them. He certainly surrounded himself with loyal Zaporogians. He also made sure that runaway serfs, found among these frontiersmen, should not be returned to their masters. It says much that Potemkin was loved by them in his lifetime: he earned the title ‘Protector of the Cossacks’.13

  Yet the destruction of the Zaporogians is always listed as one of Potemkin’s crimes – especially in modern Ukraine, where the Sech is regarded as the forerunner of the Ukrainian state. But the Sech and other Hosts were doomed after Pugachev, their territory was unsettled, uncultivated and in the way of Russia’s drive to the Black Sea. Their removal allowed the annexation of the Crimea. Serenissimus is criticized for removing treasures from Zaporogian churches and distributing the lands to his cronies – yet, since he was not there himself, he ordered General Tekeli to inventory all church plate and give it to the Church.14 (Anyway, the majority of their jewels were themselves stolen.) The distribution and cultivation of land was the entire point of the annexation. He resettled these lands with Greeks who had fought for Orlov-Chesmensky and, later, state peasants from the Russian interior, and began building fortresses to protect them. Indeed, one modern historian argues that it was cultivation of these steppes that provided Russia with the resources and food supply to defeat Napoleon in 1812.15

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  On 31 May 1778, Catherine approved Potemkin’s plan for a Black Sea port called Kherson, a sonorous name, ringing with his neo-Classical and Orthodox dreams of Khersoneses. This was the city made possible by the peace with Turkey and the liquidation of the Zaporogians.16 Docks were ordered. Carpenters were demanded from all over the empire. On 25 July, the Prince chose one of the Admiralty’s officers to be its first governor – Ivan Abramovich Hannibal. Probably, Potemkin was attracted to the exotic history of this man and his connection to Peter the Great.

  He was the half-black eldest son of Peter the Great’s famous blackamoor, Abraham Hannibal, an Abyssinian prince bought in Istanbul for the Tsar and adopted by him. Naming him for obvious reasons after Scipio’s adversary, Peter educated his ward, promoted him and stood as godfather to his son Ivan. Pushkin, who wrote the (uncompleted) ‘Blackamoor of Peter the Great’, was the great-nephew of Ivan Hannibal. Pushkin’s grandfather Osip Hannibal was a poor father, so the poet’s
mother was actually brought up in the household of Potemkin’s first governor of Kherson. Ivan Hannibal was as proud of his ancestry as Pushkin. When he died in 1801, the tombstone read: ‘The sultriness of Africa bore him, the cold calmed his blood.’ His portrait in the Kherson State Historical Museum shows the dark skin and fine Abyssinian features of his father and the straight hair and stockiness of his Russian mother. Now Catherine ordered Hannibal to proceed with this massive task.

  Potemkin’s first town was designed to be both the base for his new Black Sea Fleet, which so far existed only in a small way in the minor Russian ports of the Sea of Azov, and an entrepôt for Mediterranean trade. The placing of this port was a difficult decision because Russian’s gains in 1774 had given it a narrow corridor to the Black Sea. Its access was via the mouth of the Dnieper river, one of the great waterways of Rus, which reached the Black Sea through a narrow, shallow estuary called the Liman. At the end of the Liman on the Kinburn spit, Potemkin had built a small fortress. But the Ottomans kept the powerful fortress–town of Ochakov on the other bank, which effectively controlled the delta. There was no ideal place that was both defensible and a natural harbour. The naval engineers favoured Glubokaya Pristan, a deep harbour, but it was indefensible, so Potemkin chose a site further up the Dneiper where a fortress named Alexandershanz already stood. There was an island in the river that protected the port and docks. The Dnieper rapids made it hard to reach without using ‘camels’, while a bar beneath the town obstructed access to the Sea. Worse than that, Kherson was on the edge of the baking-hot steppes and marshy waterways and thousands of versts from the nearest ship timber, let alone food supplies.