Catherine the Great & Potemkin

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  Gould now rushed across Russia, working in tandem with the Prince. Gould became ‘the [Capability] Brown of Russia’ but, warned the Encyclopaedia of Gardening, ‘a foreigner established as head gardener to an Emperor becomes a despot like his master’. One senses a gardener’s jealousy of one of their kind raised to the level of a tsar of shrubberies, the Potemkin of gardens.49

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  Naturally, Potemkin pursued his Anglomania in painting too. He collected pictures and engravings and was said to own works of Titian, Van Dyck, Poussin, Raphael and da Vinci. The Prince used merchants and Russian ambassadors as his art dealers: ‘I’ve not yet found the landscape painting you wanted, my Prince, but I hope to have it soon,’50 wrote the Russian Ambassador in the Baroque capital of Saxony, Dresden.

  Now Potemkin’s English network led him to Sir Joshua Reynolds. When Harris returned to London in 1784, he gave John Joshua Proby, Lord Carysfort, a letter of introduction to Potemkin: ‘the bearer of this letter is a man of birth – a peer of Ireland’.51 Carysfort arrived in Petersburg and suggested to both the Empress and the Prince that their collections lacked English works: what about his friend Reynolds? Both agreed. The subjects were left to the artist – but Potemkin wanted something from history which suited Reynolds’s taste. Four years later, after many delays, Catherine received one painting and Potemkin two. Carysfort and Reynolds wrote to the Prince in French as the paintings set off aboard the ship Friendship. Thanking him for his hospitality in Russia, Carysfort explained to Potemkin that Catherine’s painting was ‘a young Hercules who strangles the Serpent’, adding, ‘It would be superfluous to remark to Your Highness, who has so perfect a knowledge of Ancient Literature, the story that the Painting has taken from the Odes of Pindar.’*5 Reynolds himself told Potemkin that he was going to do him the same painting, then decided on something else. This turned out to be the The Continence of Scipio. Carysfort also sent him Reynolds’s The Nymph whose Belt is Untied by a Cupidon. ‘Connoisseurs’, wrote Carysfort, ‘who have seen it have found it a great beauty.’52

  It was indeed a ‘great beauty’. Both paintings seem appropriate for Potemkin. The Nymph, or Cupid Untying the Zone of Venus as it now called, depicts the lively little Cupid undoing the belt of a glowing, bare-breasted Venus. In the other painting, Scipio, Potemkin’s ideal Classical hero – who defeated the Carthaginians as he was defeating the Turks – fights off the temptations of women and money, two things Potemkin could never resist.53 Neither Catherine nor Potemkin was in any hurry to pay: Reynolds charged Carysfort £105 for the Nymph. Catherine paid Reynolds’s executors.*6 Later, Potemkin added a Kneller and a Thomas Jones to his English collection.

  Serenissimus also patronized the best English artist in Petersburg, Richard Brompton, a Bohemian ‘harum-scarum ingenious sort of painter’, according to Jeremy Bentham, whom Catherine rescued from debtor’s prison. Potemkin almost became Brompton’s agent, even advising him what to charge. He commissioned him to paint Branicka: the splendid full-length canvas, now in the Alupka Palace in the Crimea, catches Sashenka’s pert prettiness, her clever haughtiness. Brompton also painted the Empress but, Potemkin personally ordered changes to her hair. Joseph II bought the painting, only to complain that this ‘daubing’ was ‘so horribly painted that I wanted to send it back’.54 Brompton often appealed to Potemkin in scrawled unpublished letters that fret about money and imperial patronage.55 When he died leaving 5,000 roubles’ debts, Potemkin gave his widow 1,000 roubles.56

  The enthusiasm with which Potemkin and Catherine shared their artistic tastes is another charming aspect of their relationship. When the two of them retired alone for two hours in 1785, the diplomats thought a war had started, until they learned that the couple were happily perusing some Levantine drawings brought by Sir Richard Worsley, an English traveller. Given their shared enjoyment, it was fitting that, after the Prince’s demise, his collection joined Catherine’s in the Hermitage.57

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  Meanwhile, on 28 July 1785, Jeremy Bentham set out from Brighton, bearing Shelburne’s wordly advice: ‘get into no intrigues to serve either England or Russia, not even with a handsome lady’.58 He met up with Logan Henderson and the two lissom Miss Kirtlands at Paris and travelled on via Nice and Florence (where he spotted a ‘poor old gentleman’ at the opera – the Young Pretender). The group sailed from Leghorn to Constantinople. Thence Jeremy sent Henderson and the two Miss Kirtlands by sea to the Crimea. He made his own way overland: after a dramatic journey with the sister of the Hospodar of Moldavia and twenty horsemen, he reached Krichev in February 1786.59 It was a joyous reunion: the Bentham brothers had not seen each other for five and a half years.

  Once the party was complete, the Belorussian village seemed to turn into a Tower of Babel of quarrelling, drinking and wife-swapping. The recruits were as ragged a crew as could be expected, and few were quite what they claimed: Samuel tried to control this ‘Newcastle mob – hirelings from that rabble town’.60

  Jeremy confessed to Samuel that Henderson’s milkmaid ‘nieces’, who had so impressed him with their femininity and knowledge, were neither cheese-makers nor any relation to the gardener: they were apparently troilists. Henderson did not turn out successfully. Potemkin settled the gardener and the two milking ‘nieces’ in the Tartar house near Karasubazaar. The sentimental Prince remembered his recovery from fever there in August 1783 and bought it. However, he soon learned that Henderson was a ‘shameless impostor’ who had not even ‘planted a single blade of grass and Mamzel [one of the girls] has not made a single cheese’.61

  Roebuck, another recruit, travelled with his ‘soi-disant wife’, who turned out to be a thorough slattern. She offered ‘her services to either of the Newcastle men’, wishing to be rid of her ruffian husband.62 Samuel managed to pass her on to Prince Dashkov: these Russian Anglophiles were grateful for a gardener’s wench – if she came from the land of Shakespeare. Samuel suspected ‘the very quarrelsome’ Roebuck of stealing diamonds at Riga – he was ‘not the most honest’. When Potemkin summoned Samuel, Jeremy was left in charge, which led to more bad behaviour. Dr Debraw, the bee sexologist, proved an utter nuisance. He stalked into Jeremy’s study ‘with a countenance of a man out of Bedlam’ and demanded a pass to leave. This stew of crooks even stole Samuel’s money to pay off their debts.63 There were rebellions against the Benthams led by Benson the general factotum, who again ‘like a man let loose from Bedlam’ abused Jeremy, who had never seen him before in his life.64 Then ‘the termagant cook–housekeeper’ joined ‘the male seducers’ by luring ‘old Benson’ to her bed.65 The word ‘Bedlam’ appeared with ominous and appropriate frequency in the Benthams’ letters.

  Despite the capers of these expatriates, the Benthams achieved an immense amount, both literary and mercantile: ‘The day has an abundance more hours in it at Krichev or rather at our cottage three miles off where I now live,’ wrote Jeremy. ‘I rise a little before the sun, get breakfast done in less than an hour and do not eat again until eight…at night.’ He was working on his Code of civil law, a French version of the Rationale of Reward and the Defence of Usury. But he had also ‘been obliged to go a begging to my brother and borrow an idea…’. This was the Panopticon – Samuel’s solution to supervising this rabble of Russians, Jews and Geordies: a factory constructed so that the manager could see all his workers from one central observation point. Jeremy the legal reformer could immediately see its use in prisons. He worked from dawn till dusk on the Panopticon.66

  Both Jeremy and Samuel were also pursuing another great ambition that was close to Potemkin’s heart: to become landowners in the Crimea. ‘We are going to be great farmers,’ announced Jeremy. ‘I dare say he would give us a good portion of land to both of us if we wish it…’.67 But despite Potemkin’s cruelly teasing Samuel – ‘you have only to say of which kind’68 – the Benthams never became Crimean magnates – though they did get a sha
re in one of Korsakov’s estates.

  Samuel meanwhile was running the factories, trading with Riga and Kherson in foreign exchange (changing Potemkin’s 20,000 roubles for ducats) and English cloth, and building baidaks (riverboats) for the Dnieper. Despite the ‘Bedlamite’ behaviour of his recruits, he often praised other workers who helped him to achieve so much. In the first two years he had already built two big vessels and eight baidaks; in 1786, he produced an impressive twenty baidaks.69 It was all so dramatic and exciting that old Jeremiah Bentham decided he might to come out too. But two Benthams were enough.

  In 1786, Potemkin’s orders changed. Since 1783, Catherine and Potemkin had been debating when the Empress should inspect her new domains in the south. The trip had always been delayed but now it looked as if it would actually happen. Samuel was already an expert at building barges and baidaks for the Dnieper. Now Potemkin ordered him to produce thirteen yachts and twelve luxury barges in which the Empress could cruise down the Dnieper to Kherson. Samuel had been experimenting with a new invention which he called ‘the vermicular’, which is best described as ‘an oar-propelled articulated floating train, a series of floating boxes cunningly linked together’.70 Samuel set to work and managed to fulfil Potemkin’s massive order, to which he added an imperial vermicular – a six-section barge, 252 feet long, driven by 120 oars.

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  Jeremy Bentham, who wanted to meet the famous Potemkin, was waiting for Serenissimus to visit the estate while Samuel was away, testing his ships. Since it seems that most of Russia spent much of this period feverishly anticipating the arrival of the ‘Prince of Princes’, this was not surprising. Meanwhile, that incongruous British community, the rebellious Belorussian Bedlam, behaved worse than ever now that they were being nervously managed by the philosopher of utlitarianism on a part-time basis.

  Potemkin had not paid them yet. Dr Debraw, gardener Roebuck and butler–factotum Benson were now in open rebellion. Many of the British clearly enjoyed a traditional expatriate life of abandoned debauchery. Soon they began to perish prolifically, a misfortune that Samuel said had more to do with their intemperate lifestyle than with the unwholesome climate. Debraw had just been made physician-general to the army when he died, possibly a mercy for the Russian soldiers. The rest either expired or were dispersed.71

  ‘We have been in hourly expectation of the Prince on his way to his Governments for a considerable time…’, wrote Jeremy Bentham, but, as so often, the Prince was always delayed.72 A few days later, Potemkin’s niece– mistress Countess Skavronskaya stopped at Krichev on her way to Petersburg from Naples and told them that ‘the Prince of Princes had given up his intentions of coming’.73 Some biographers have claimed that Potemkin and Jeremy Bentham had long philosophical discussions,74 but there is no account of such a meeting. If they had met, it is hard to believe that Jeremy would not have written about it.*7

  Finally, after more than a year in Potemkin’s world, Jeremy Bentham departed through Poland, staying in lots of ‘Jew inns’. Dirty houses and filthy animals had their consolations: gorgeous Jewesses. Here’s a typical entry: ‘Pretty Jewess, hogs in the stable…fowls free in the house.’75 The philosopher even managed a singular compliment for a travelling Englishman of his century: one household of Jewesses were so magnificent that ‘the whole family, fine flesh and blood, [were] not inferior to English’ (author’s italics).

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  The estate flourished: in Krichev, Potemkin had taken advice from his Swiss medical adviser Dr Behr on reducing mortality, possibly by inoculation. The male serf population had risen from 14,000 to 21,000 in just a few years.76 Its estate and financial accounts show its importance to the Kherson fleet, while Bentham’s unpublished letters in Potemkin’s archives reveal how the Black Sea cities used Krichev as their supply yard. In the two years and eight months up to August 1785, Bentham’s enterprise sent Kherson rigging, sailcloth and riverboats worth 120,000 roubles and cable and canvas worth 90,000 roubles. In 1786, Bentham delivered 11,000 roubles’s worth of baidaks. When Samuel had moved on, its canvas production trebled, its ships’ tackle doubled. Many of the factories were highly profitable by 1786: the brandy distillery made 25,000 roubles per annum; the 172 looms made another 25,000 roubles; and the ropewalk produced 1,000 poods or sixteen tons a week, creating maybe 12,000 roubles.77 However, profit and loss accounts meant little to Potemkin: his sole criterion was what brought glory and power to the Empire – which meant his army, navy and cities. By this criterion, this imperial arsenal and factory was an outstanding success.

  Suddenly, in 1787, the Prince sold the entire complex, for 900,000 roubles, in order to purchase even bigger estates in Poland. He had received the estate for nothing and, though he had invested a lot, it is unlikely that hiring English artisans cost anything close to that. As always with the Machiavellian Prince, there were grand political reasons for the sudden sale of what he had built up so carefully. He moved some of the factories to his estates in Kremenchuk, leaving others to continue under new management. When the estate was sold, Krichev’s Jews tried to raise a purse to buy the estate themselves ‘to enable Sam[uel Bentham] to buy up this town’. But nothing came of it.

  This was the end of the Krichev adventure for Jeremy Bentham and his British recruits. But it was far from the end for Potemkin’s two favourite Englishmen – Samuel Bentham and William Gould. Both were to play large roles in his future. The Prince had so far used Sam Bentham as a Siberian mining consultant, factory-manager, shipbuilder, colonel of Musketeers, agronomist and inventor. Now he was to bring his barges up the river on a special mission and then become a quartermaster, artillery expert, fighting naval officer, Siberian instructor and Chinese–Alaskan trader, in that order.

  Gould, his team constantly increasing with more experts from England, became an indispensable part of the Prince’s entourage – the harbinger of Potemkin himself, arriving with tools, workmen and trees, a few weeks before the great man himself. In the coming war, none of Potemkin’s peripatetic headquarters was complete without a Gould garden. But his masterpiece was to be the Winter Garden at the Taurida Palace.

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  Serenissimus occasionally neglected his British guests because of the necessity of his juggling Petersburg politics with southern enterprise. At the very beginning of Samuel Bentham’s adventure, when he was travelling with Potemkin on the way back from the Crimea, Potemkin promised to accompany him to Krichev to decide what to do there. They stopped in Kremenchuk, where news reached Potemkin from Petersburg that changed everything.

  Without a word of goodbye, the Prince left Kremenchuk with the ‘utmost expedition’, taking just one servant with him.78 Only one person in the world could make Potemkin drop everything like that.

  Skip Notes

  *1 Potemkin took Reginald Pole Carew on a tour of his industrial holdings in 1781, including his glass and brick factories near Schlüsselburg, another glass factory near the Alexander Nevsky Monastery, and his iron foundry twenty miles outside Petersburg on his Eschenbaum estate, which was run by an Englishman, Mr Hill. Pole Carew also visited Krichev and Potemkin’s other estates down the Dnieper, and suggested founding an English colony on a formerly Zaporogian island where Potemkin later settled immigrants.

  *2 Card games followed political fashions. For example, the Comte de Ségur explains in his Mémoires how in Paris the faro of high aristocracy gave way to English whist, representing moderate liberty as explained by Montesquieu, but when the American War showed that Kings could be defied, ‘boston’ became the fashion.

  *3 Alupka is the remarkable Crimea palace built in a mixture of Scottish baronial, Arabesque and Gothic architecture by Prince Mikhail Vorontsov and his wife Lise, who was Potemkin’s great-niece. It is now a museum. See Epilogue.

  *4 We can follow some of Gould’s adventures in the archives: i
n 1785, he is paid 1,453 roubles for a tool needed in the Crimea; the next year, 500 roubles for gardeners coming from England to join the team. In 1786/7, Gould headed from Petersburg to the Crimea with 200 roubles for the journey and 225 for his carriage. Then he joined the Prince in Moldavia during the war, travelling with him to Dubossary in 1789 (800 roubles) and the next year to Jassy (650 roubles).

  *5 The bitchy Horace Walpole laughed at the appropriateness of the subject since two tsars had been killed, at least one strangled, to secure Catherine’s crown.

  *6 Potemkin’s paintings were admired in the Hermitage by Parkinson in 1792. None of the three Reynoldes is now on display in the Hermitage, but they are exhibited abroad. When the author searched for them in 1998, they were in a dusty corridor used as a storeroom, leaning forlornly against the wall.

  *7 Potemkin may never have got the chance to encounter Jeremy Bentham. But we can: he rests, stuffed, pale and desiccated but clearly recognizable, his ‘auto-icon’, in the corridors of University College, London.

  21

  THE WHITE NEGRO

  Besides the Empress sometimes liked a boy

  And had just buried the fair faced Lanskoi

  Lord Byron, Don Juan, Canto IX: 47

  On 25 June 1784, Lieutenant-General Alexander Lanskoy, Catherine’s twenty-six-year-old favourite, died at Tsarskoe Selo with the Empress beside him. His illness was sudden: he had come down with a sore throat less than a week earlier. Lanskoy seemed to know he was going to die – though Catherine tried to dissuade him – and he did so with the quiet dignity he had brought to his awkward position.1 Yet the most malicious rumours were soon abroad about his demise: he had died ‘in place’ with Catherine, he had ruined his fragile health by taking dangerous aphrodisiacs to satisfy his nymphomaniacal old mistress. As he died, it was claimed he ‘quite literally burst – his belly burst’. Soon after death, ‘his legs dropped off. The stench was also insufferable. Those who gave him his coffin…died.’ These were rumours of poisoning: had Potemkin, already blamed for bringing on Prince Orlov’s madness by slow poison, killed another rival? Judging by Catherine’s tragic account to Grimm and other witnesses, Lanskoy probably died of diphtheria. Thanks to the baking summer and the delay before Catherine could bear to bury him, the stench is only too believable. The innards of unburied corpses do tend to swell in the heat.2