Catherine the Great & Potemkin

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  The obstacles were overwhelming, but Potemkin repeatedly overcame them to build his city. No one in Petersburg believed it would be completed. Not for nothing did Catherine write to him: ‘Kherson will never be built without you.’ Simultaneously, the jealousy that was to ruin Potemkin’s reputation rose even before the first stone had been laid. ‘The foundation of Kherson will become famous,’ fumed Zavadovsky. ‘Its creator loves his project and pushes it.’17 He was right: Potemkin almost willed the town into existence and drove Hannibal relentlessly. By August, the Russo-Abyssinian had established twelve teams of workers and bought timber on the upper Dnieper in Russian Belorussia and Poland. Everything had to be floated down the river to Kherson.

  Potemkin hired over 500 carpenters and thousands of workers, founded the shipyards and planned the town. The first keels of warships were laid down in May 1779. Two more were on the way by 1781. Serenissimus decided to employ the army, which started with its own wooden barracks, using mud wattle for the walls at first. Next he imported 1,000 criminals to work the quarries.18 Then he gave the merchant Faleev his big chance, persuading him to dynamite the rocky Dneiper rapids in return for a slice of Kherson’s future trade. Faleev, who invested in its success, undertook this major work. Potemkin supplied the gunpowder. By 1783, Faleev had succeeded to the extent that some barges could sail straight down to Kherson. The Prince rewarded him with the rank of major, raising him to nobility.19

  Potemkin’s critics claimed that little was built and nothing was done well – and history has believed them. Fortunately, the well-born Westerns who visited Petersburg on their Grand Tours met Potemkin, who always directed them to Kherson. One of the first of these was a young English engineer, Samuel Bentham, brother of the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy, who was to work with Potemkin for five years. In 1780, he saw Kherson already had 180 houses and had launched one sixty-four-gunned ship-of-the-line and five frigates, and marvelled: ‘He chose the spot not above two…years ago when there was not even a hut here.’ The timber, he noted, had to be floated down from a town in Poland that was later to become famous – Chernobyl.20

  Another intrepid Englishman, and a friend of Samuel Bentham, was Reginald Pole Carew, an Oxford graduate and Cornish landowner in his late twenties, who witnessed the next stage. He was the sort of young man who would later play the Great Game. Potemkin adopted Pole Carew, showing him his estates and fabriks (factories) round Petersburg before he headed south. Pole Carew’s notes, still unpublished, read as if he was either writing a book or engaged in amateur espionage. By the time he arrived, there were already 300 houses in Kherson. Apart from nine regiments of soldiers, ‘up to now the town is mainly inhabited by Polish Jews and Greeks…Soldiers, sailors, peasants are all being used…in building,’ but he noticed that the work on the fortifications was being done too fast ‘for fear of disgusting higher powers’.21 These were his real feelings, but he also tactfully told the Prince that ‘what I see here surpasses imagination’.22

  Potemkin was determined to attract trade to his Viceroyalty. In 1781, Pole Carew discussed a potential trading business with General Hannibal, and with Kherson’s two tycoons – Potemkin’s merchant Faleev and the Frenchman Antoine. Faleev had founded the Black Sea Company to trade with the Ottomans and soon launched his frigate, the Borysthenes. He also had the brandy farm for Potemkin’s three guberniya and supplied the soldiers with meat: Pole Carew reckoned he already made 500,000 roubles a year. Pole Carew listed the goods that could be traded in Kherson – wax, flags, rope, timber,23 and was tempted by the trading opportunities. ‘It is a bourgeois of Kherson who writes to you,’ he told the Prince.24

  Antoine of Marseilles, later Baron de Saint-Joseph, was the town’s shipping magnate. Setting off to Petersburg, he called on the Prince proposing the creation of a trading post and free port at Kherson. Potemkin was delighted,25 and invited Catherine to ‘abolish internal customs duties and to reconsider external ones’.26 However keen he was on Britain, the Prince realized that France dominated Mediterranean trade from Marseilles and this was to have political consequences. By 1786, Antoine told Potemkin that, in the last year, eleven of his French ships had arrived from Marseilles.27

  Nonetheless, Kherson was a struggle. Potemkin supervised every detail when he had time: on 3 August 1783, he wrote to his engineer Colonel Gaks in Kherson, ‘I’m confirming for the second time that the building of the hospital must be finished…’. On 14 October, ‘I am surprised that in spite of being assured by you that the hospital is finished, it has not even been begun…’. Then he added: ‘It’s strange to me that sometimes orders are cancelled when they have been confirmed by me.’ In other words, if there was any deception in the building of Kherson, Potemkin was its victim, but he could not be everywhere at once. A week later, he was ordering Gaks to build two baths to fight the plague – ‘one for the absolutely healthy and another for the weak…’ and ‘Don’t forget to build breweries.’ But Hannibal and Gaks were simply not getting things accomplished. Potemkin was frustrated. The next February, Potemkin sacked Gaks and appointed Colonel Nikolai Korsakov, a talented engineer educated in Britain. Potemkin confirmed the annual budget of 233, 740 roubles, but wanted everything finished ‘in a short time’ while insisting on both ‘durability’ and ‘beauty inside’.28 The Prince himself approved every plan, each building façade – from the school to the archbishop’s house to his own residence – and it began to take shape.29

  A painting of Kherson in its Museum shows its central square as Potemkin designed it: there is the beautiful church of St Catherine’s. Later, in 1790, the Prince was still beautifying it. When his favourite architect Ivan Starov came to the south, Potemkin ordered him to ‘remake the cupola in the cathedral in Kherson’ exactly like the one in his St Petersburg Palace, ‘and fix a place for the belfry’.30 It was done. The dome and the bell-tower remain exactly as the Prince ordered. Potemkin’s palace stood at right angles to it.

  His memoranda to his officials completely destroy the image of Potemkin in most Western accounts.31 These are the works of a man aware of the difficulties his officials faced. He was certainly authoritarian, concerned with the smallest details, but surprisingly flexible in giving second chances to overworked officials. Potemkin was aware as anyone that Kherson’s position made it extremely vulnerable to disease. Reading between the lines, it must have been a ghastly posting. Pole Carew recorded that the shipwrights sent from Kronstadt and Petersburg had ‘died off’. When ships from Istanbul and soldiers from across the Empire poured into the area as Potemkin organized the taking of the Crimea, the threat of an epidemic became serious. By 1786, the French merchant Antoine had lost his brothers and many employees. Kherson ‘resembled a vast hospital: one only saw dead and dying’. The Prince tried to control local health and keep the fevers at bay.32 He took special care with hospitals and breweries (to provide drinking water), even telling the inhabitants to eat greens,33 and personally appointed the doctors34 to his hospitals.*1

  Everything was driven by the manic enthusiasm of the man Catherine called the ‘young Colossus of Kherson’.35 His infectious energy was the only thing that could triumph over the sloth of the Russian bureaucrat: returning from his new town, he spoke to James Harris ‘with raptures of the climate, soil, and situation of Kherson.’36 But every visit revealed more mistakes by his subordinates. That was why he began to spend more and more time away and why Catherine admitted that the trips were worth it, however much she missed him.37

  It is usually claimed that Potemkin concealed the mistakes in Kherson. On the contrary. He confided a catalogue of failures to Catherine. He dismissed Hannibal – apparently for building the fortifications poorly; he could not find any sense in the Admiralty; too much money had been spent; there was not enough wood; the timber they had was unsound. ‘Oh Matushka, what a mess and what dishonesty is here in the Admiralty!’ It was too hot. The buildings still stood in a wilderness. ‘Nobody has even had the sense to plant trees.
I’ve now ordered it.’38 He demanded more experts: ‘send the staff according the enclosed list. There aren’t enough smiths here. I’ve sent to Tula for them.’

  The town continued to grow. When Kirill Razumovsky visited in 1782, he was amazed by the stone buildings, fortress, battle-ships, ‘spacious suburb’, barracks and Greek merchant ships: ‘Imagine all this and you will understand my bewilderment for not so long ago there was nothing here but a building where beehives are kept for the winter.’39 Francisco de Miranda, the South American revolutionary, who was also temporarily adopted by Potemkin, had the chance to examine Kherson in December 1786. He claimed it had 40,000 inhabitants – 30,000 military and 10,000 civilians. There were 1,200 ‘very good houses built on stone’.40 After Potemkin’s death, the English traveller Maria Guthrie and the Russian writer Sumarokov praised the ‘handsome town’41 with St Catherine’s, fourteen churches, synagogue, 22,000 Orthodox inhabitants and 2,500 Jews.42

  Potemkin learned from his mistakes in Kherson. He boasted that his use of soldier-labour saved the state money, but he had a tsar’s conception of budgets. Work had to be done fast, but, if it was not done correctly, like the fortress, he insisted on starting again: results were paramount, costs irrelevant to a semi-emperor who was allowed to treat the imperial Treasury as his own. However, the best rebuttal of Potemkin’s critics is today’s shipbuilding city.*2

  Serenissimus commissioned two full-length icons for Kherson’s fine neo-Classical church – one of St George, the other of St Catherine, he wielding a lance and wearing Roman military uniform, breastplate and red cloak, she in a golden dress and ermine-lined red cloak. His eyes are cast upward, she looks right at us. Then it strikes one: if St Catherine is a passable likeness of the Empress, St George43 is unmistakably Potemkin.*3

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  If the fall of the Zaporogians made Kherson possible, the end of the Crimean Khanate gave Potemkin his real chance to develop the south. It also made Kherson more of a commercial town and less necessary as a naval base because the Crimea was so well endowed with harbours. Kherson perched on the steppe, while the Crimea was the marketplace of the Black Sea, the hothouse and kitchen-garden of Constantinople.

  Potemkin and his Empress longed to follow in Peter the Great’s footsteps. Peter had taken the Baltic from the Swedes, built a Russian fleet there and founded a city there. Now Potemkin had taken the Black Sea from the Tartars and Turks, built a Russian fleet and longed to found a Petersburg of his own. ‘Petersburg established by the Baltic Sea is the Northern capital of Russia, Moscow the middle one and let Kherson of Akhtiar be the southern capital of my Sovereign,’ he wrote to Catherine.44 Kherson again! They loved the very word.

  First, he attended to the creation of a port for his fleet. Akhtiar, Serenissimus told the Empress from the Crimea in June 1783, ‘is the best harbour in the world’.45 It was to be Russia’s new naval base and Potemkin hurried to fortify it and build shipyards,46 before he had even fully annexed the Khanate.47 The Prince, of course, gave Akhtiar a Greek name: Sebastopol. He immediately founded a city in the ‘natural amphitheatre on the side of a hill’48 and ordered his engineer Korsakov to build ‘a strong fortification. The Admiralty must be conveniently located for unloading’ and there must be a road through the peninsula ‘as good as a Roman’ one. ‘I shall name it the Catherine Road.’49 The engineer agreed with Potemkin’s choice for the city: ‘The most suitable place there is that which Your Highness has fixed…’.50 Only four years later, when Potemkin visited the city with his friend Francisco de Miranda, the South American counted ‘fourteen frigates, three ships-of-the-line of 66 guns and a gunboat’. Miranda immediately grasped the value of Potemkin’s new city: the harbour could hold a fleet of ‘over 100 vessels’. If faced with disaster, a fleet could be repaired within a week.51 Soon after Potemkin’s death, Maria Guthrie52 called it ‘one of the finest ports in the world’. Sebastopol remains Russia’s (and Ukraine’s) greatest naval base.*4

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  Serenissimus was ecstatic about his Crimea, touring the peninsula while ordering his favourite engineer Nikolai Korsakov to advise on fortifications, and his scientific experts such as the botanist Hablitz, who had endured the trauma of Potemkin’s Persian expedition, to report on population and fauna.

  ‘I don’t describe the beauties of the Crimea because it would take too much time…’, the Prince told his Empress in June 1783, as he annexed the peninsula and celebrated its charms, strategic potential and Classical history.53 It is impossible not to share in Potemkin’s feverish and exuberant fiesta of creation in that magical place with which he had fallen in love. Even today, it is easy to see why: as one passes through the Perekop Straits, past the salt lakes, which were the Khan’s major source of income, the northern Crimea appears flat, arid, monotonous. But an hour to the south and it changes completely into a lush garden of Eden that most resembles the vineyards of southern Italy or Spain. Hills of greenery and vines rise to the battlements of medieval Genoese fortresses overlooking white cliffs and azure bays. Potemkin, who adored gardens, began to plant trees, celebrating the birth of the Grand Duke’s children by laying out avenues of bay trees and olive groves. He imagined the Empress visiting his ‘paradise’. The Romanovs in the next century and the twentieth-century Politburo apparatchiks were to make the Crimea their elite holiday resort, but Potemkin, to his credit, always wanted it to be far more than that.54

  His first moves were to protect the Moslem Tartars from the brutish philistinism of his own soldiery: again and again, he ordered his generals to ‘treat the inhabitants kindly and not to offend them. The chiefs of…regiments must set an example.’55 He put special observers with regiments to keep an eye on their behaviour – or, as he put it, ‘for the villages’ protection’ – and report to him ‘all forbidden actions’, and placed the Taurian region under Crimean murzas, especially the renegade Iakub Aga, who had become Yakov Izmailovich Rudzevich.56 As he told Catherine, he gave money to maintain mosques and muftis. Indeed, when he travelled through the Crimea with Francisco de Miranda, he always met the local mufti and made a donation to his mosque.57 Potemkin gave the Tartar murzas Russian nobility and the right to own land.58 Typically, he formed a Tartar Crimean army, a little one for display.59 It was traditional Russian imperialism to co-opt the Moslem hierarchies, but Potemkin’s sensitive care for them is unusual in a Russian soldier of any epoch.

  The Tartars were not farmers and never developed the land: ‘This peninsula may become even better if we get rid of the Tartars by making them leave…God knows, they are not worth this soil and the Kuban is a suitable place for them.’ Potemkin shared the instincts of Russian imperialists to uproot people like chess pieces – but, he did not move them. In fact, he often favoured them and went to great lengths to make them stay. But thousands of the Tartars left anyway: their attitude was neatly put in the back-handed compliment of a Crimean mufti to Miranda: he remembered Potemkin taking the Crimea as ‘a woman remembers the man who deflowers her’.60

  Potemkin decided that the Crimean capital should be built on the Tartar town of Ak-mechet in the dry, flat middle of the peninsula: he called it Simferopol, still the capital today,61 and still the same flat, carefully laid-out, dull city created by Potemkin.62 The massive scale of Potemkin’s plans extended from Kherson to Sebastopol, from Balaklava, Theodosia, Kerch, Yenikale and back to Kherson again. In all these places, new cities were founded or existing fortresses expanded into towns. But Colonel Korsakov was equal to all this. ‘Matushka,’ Potemkin raved to Catherine, ‘we’ve never had an engineer like Korsakov before…This man has to be looked after.’63 Within five years, Sebastopol and its fleet were ready to be inspected by the two Caesars of the east.

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  In 1784, Potemkin decided to build a sumptuous capital for this southern Empire – a veritable new Athens – on the site of a small Zaporogian village called Pa
lavitsa. He wished to call it ‘Ekaterinoslav’. Incapable of doing anything by halves, he fell in love with the name because it meant ‘Catherine’s Glory’ and he wanted to use it everywhere. (Indeed he also used it to rename his entire Viceroyalty.) ‘Most Merciful Sovereign,’ wrote the Prince, ‘where, if not in the land devoted to your glory, should there be a city with magnificent buildings? That is why I undertook the development of projects that would suit the high name of this city.’ Potemkin envisaged a neo-Classical metropolis: its law courts were to resemble ‘ancient basilikas’, its marketplace a huge semi-circle ‘like the Propylaeum, or threshold of Athens’. The governor-general’s house would be in ‘Greek and Roman style’.64

  Catherine, whose visions of Classicism and altruism were the same as his, approved his plans.65 Serenissimus considered possible designs for over a year. Finally, in 1786, the French architect Claude Giroir produced his design for a central square and a grid of streets at right angles to the Dnieper, but Potemkin’s architect Starov perfected the final plans. In January 1787, the Prince proudly displayed them to Francisco de Miranda, who was impressed with their ‘Roman grandeur and architectural taste’. Potemkin wanted to employ 16,000 workmen for nine or ten years. Miranda wondered if it would ever be completed.66

  Nothing in his career provoked such mockery as Ekaterinoslav. The building of a town here was necessary to develop the empty Zaporogian steppes, but the sin was its grandeur. Even the anti-Potemkin lies are interesting because of the light they shed on the extent to which Potemkin’s enemies would go to blacken his name. Most histories claim Potemkin founded Ekaterinoslav in an unhealthy place and almost immediately had to move it, due to his own incompetence. It is true that in 1778, six years earlier, he had allowed a provincial governor to found a settlement for Armenians and Greeks, the Crimean refugees, on the River Kilchen, using the name ‘Ekaterinoslav’. Now he simply took the name for his ‘famous city’, but he did not move the original one, which already had Greek, Armenian and Catholic quarters with three churches67 and almost 3,000 inhabitants. He simply renamed it Novomoskovsk.68