Catherine the Great & Potemkin

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  Ségur and his friend Ligne claimed that Potemkin ‘had less acquired his knowledge from books than from men’. This was clearly untrue. The Prince was widely read. Pole Carew, who spent so much time with him at the start of the decade, stated his culture came from ‘copious reading in his earlier years’ – hence his ‘knowledge and taste for the Greek language’.100 Potemkin’s advice to Catherine on a Greek education for the little Grand Dukes shows his artistic ear for the Greek language: ‘It’s hard to imagine how much knowledge and delicate taste one can get from learning it. The language has the loveliest harmony and much play of thought.’101

  His library, which he gradually expanded by buying collections from scholars and friends like Archbishop Voulgaris, reveals his broad interests: there were all the classics from Seneca, Horace and Plutarch to Les Amours de Sappho, published in Paris in 1724; many works of theology, war, agriculture and economics including Coutumes monastiques, manuals of artillery, Uniformes Militaires and La Richesse des Nations de Schmitt (Adam Smith); many works on Peter the Great, but also the masterpieces of the philosophes from Voltaire and Diderot to Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. His Anglophilia and his obsession with English gardens were covered in histories of England, the works of Locke and Newton, the Caricatures de Hoguard (Hogarth) and of course Britannia Illustré ou deux livres des vues des principales maisons et jardins…de la Grande Bretagne. By the time he died his huge collection contained 1,065 foreign works and 106 in Russian: it filled eighteen carriages.102

  His political ideas were quintessentially Russian, despite imbibing the tolerance of the philosophes and the utilitarianism of Bentham. He believed that absolutism was the best system for an empire the size of Russia. The ruler was a woman and a state and he served both. The three revolutions – the American, French and Polish – appalled and fascinated him. He cross-examined Ségur about the Americans, for whom the Frenchman had fought, but ‘did not believe that republican institutions could have a long life in a land so vast. His mind, so accustomed to absolute despotism, could not admit the possibility of a union of order and liberty.’103 As for the French Revolution, Potemkin simply told the Comte de Langeron: ‘Colonel, your countrymen are a pack of madmen.’104 The Prince believed that politics was the art of infinite flexibility and philosophical patience in order to attain a fixed objective. ‘You must have patience,’ he lectured Harris, ‘depend on it. The chapter of accidents will serve you better than all your rhetoric.’ Potemkin’s political motto was ‘Improve events as they arise.’105*6

  The Prince liked to talk ‘divinity to his generals and tactics to his bishops’, said Ligne, and Lev Engelhardt observed him ‘playing off’ his ‘erudite rabbis, Old Believers and different scholars against each other’.106 His ‘favourite topic’ was the ‘separation of the Greek and Latin Churches’, the only sure way to win his attention was talk about ‘the Councils of Nicaea, Chalcedon and Florence’. Sometimes he wanted to found a religious order, sometimes wander Russia as a monk. This was why Frederick the Great had ordered his ambassador in the 1770s to study Orthodoxy, the best way to befriend the Prince.

  He joked about religion – teasing Suvorov for observance of fasts – ‘You wish to enter paradise astride a sturgeon’ – but essentially he was a serious ‘son of the Church’, never joining the Masonic lodges.107 He may have swung between being a coenobite and a sybarite, but he was certainly a believer, who could tell Catherine during the coming war, ‘Christ will help, He’ll put an end to our adversity. Look through your life and you can see what a lot of unexpected benefits came to you from Him in misfortune…It was a mere chance that your coronation coincided with the feast of the Apostles’ – and who could then quote the appropriate chapter 16 verse 1 from the Epistle of Paul to the Romans.108 He often dreamed of retiring to the Church. ‘Be a good mother,’ he asked Catherine, ‘prepare a good bishop’s mitre and a quiet tenure.’109 Potemkin never let religion ruin his pleasures – Ségur ‘saw him spend a morning examining models of hats for dragoons, bonnets and dresses for his nieces, and mitres and habits for priests’. He staggered from church to orgy and back, ‘waving with one hand to the women that please him and with the other making the sign of the Cross’, observed Ligne, ‘embracing the feet of a statue of the Virgin or the alabaster neck of his mistress’.110 A religious man and a great sinner, he was the ‘epitome of the Russian’s staggering ability to live upright within while enveloped in unceasing sin’.111

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  The Prince also passed much of the night at the green baize tables. If French was the language that united Europe, faro was the game: a squire from Leicestershire, a mountebank from Venice, a planter from Virginia and an officer from Sebastopol played the same game that required no language. A night of faro at Potemkin’s Palace in the mid-1780s was probably very much like a game at Chatsworth with Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, who was also a compulsive gamester. The players would sit at an oval table covered in green baize with a wooden rim across it to separate the cards. A tailleur (banker) sat opposite the croup and the players bet on the cards turned up on either side of the rim. The players could double stakes all the way up to a soixante et le va – sixty times the stake, all of which was wordlessly announced by complicated mutilations, or bending, of the cards. Thus faro peculiarly suited Potemkin: the taking of vast risks without the need to speak a word.

  He used gambling in a very Potemkinish manner. One occasion was recounted later by Pushkin. A young man, named ‘Sh.’, was about to be ruined by the debts owed to ‘Prince B.’, who was going to complain to the Empress. The young man’s family begged Potemkin to intercede. He sent a message to ‘Sh.’ to visit him during the card game the next day and insisted, ‘Tell him to be bolder with me.’ When ‘Sh.’ arrived, Potemkin was already playing. When ‘Prince B.’ arrived, he was poorly received, so he sat and watched the game. Suddenly Potemkin called ‘Sh.’ over and, showing him his cards, asked, ‘Tell me, brother, how would you play this hand?’ Young ‘Sh.’, remembering his instructions, replied rudely, ‘What affair is it of mine? Play the best you can!’ Everyone watched Potemkin to see how he would react to this insolence. ‘Dear me,’ said Serenissimus, ‘one can’t say a word to you, batinka. You fly straight off the handle!’ When ‘Prince B.’ saw this, he realized that ‘Sh.’ must be in the highest favour with Potemkin and Catherine. He never called in the debt.112 Gamblers played for rouleaux of banknotes, but the Prince had long since forgotten the value of money. So he insisted that they play for gemstones, which sat beside him on the green baize in a glistening pile.113 Debts were settled among adventurers by duels – but not by a man of Potemkin’s stature. Nonetheless, his fellow gamblers risked cheating because, while Potemkin was playing for fun backed by Catherine’s bottomless purse, they were placing their entire family fortunes at the mercy of the dice. When one player (possibly Levashov, Yermolov’s uncle) paid his winnings with rhinestones, Potemkin said nothing but arranged his vengeance with the coachman. That afternoon during a storm, the Prince went riding alongside the cheat’s carriage. When the carriage was in the midst of a flooded field, Potemkin yelled, ‘Off you go,’ to the coachman, who galloped off with the horses, leaving the victim behind. When he finally walked home, hours later, his silk clothes soaked, the bedraggled cheat was greeted with gales of laughter from the Prince at the window. But nothing more was ever said about his cheating.114

  Potemkin’s games could not be interrupted. When summoned to the Council, he simply refused to go. When the messenger humbly asked the reason, Potemkin snapped, ‘In the 1st Psalm and 1st verse.’ When the Council looked it up, this read: ‘Beatus vir qui non abiit in consilio impiorum,’*7 thereby simultaneously displaying his wit, memory, arrogance, theological knowledge and gambling mania.115

  Somehow, between sunset and sunrise, the Prince also sliced through swathes of papers – it was probably when he did the greatest part of his work. His secret
aries were on duty and Popov, in between gambling bouts, often stood behind his chair with pen and pad, awaiting his orders, recording his ideas.

  Dawn

  When this insomniac finally went to sleep, the carriage of one of his mistresses sometimes stood on Millionaya Street outside the Winter Palace. Inside it, the lady longingly and lovingly watched the candles still burning, just before dawn. ‘I passed your house and I saw all the lights on. No doubt you were playing cards. My dear Prince…give me this pleasure, do something for me and don’t stay up as you do until four or five in the morning…my darling Prince.’116

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  Since the Prince could not live without his English gardens, the travels of his gardener William Gould were a weathervane of Potemkin’s intentions. In late 1786, the English ‘Emperor of Gardens’ set off for the south in style with his ‘general staff’ of gardeners and workmen. The cognoscenti knew this meant that something important was afoot.117 The Empress was about to depart on her grandiose journey to the Crimea to meet the Holy Roman Emperor under the gaze of Europe. In November 1786, Serenissimus, the impresario of this imperial progress, departed to make the last checks on the route. On this trip, he excelled himself in his flamboyant choice of carriage companions: a Venezuelan liberator and mountebank who kept a diary of his Ukrainian whorings, and an aspiring king of Ouidah and freebooter, who had been seduced by the Queen of Tahiti.

  Skip Notes

  *1 Giambattista Lampi, 1751–1830, was one of the most fashionable portrait painters in Vienna – Joseph II and Kaunitz sat for him. Potemkin seemed to have shared him with the Austrians, sometimes asking Kaunitz to send him over. The paintings done in 1791 before he died were copied by painters like Roslin and sold in prints.

  *2 The great favourites of earlier epochs, such as the Count-Duke of Olivares and Cardinal Richelieu, both suffered recurring nervous collapses.

  *3 Oliver Cromwell, the Duke of Marlborough and Clive of India are among the many gifted leaders who are said to have displayed cyclothymic traits.

  *4 In our times, this resembles President L.B. Johnson humiliating his cabinet from his lavatory seat.

  *5 The Prince loved his food and when Monsieur Ballez’s much anticipated arrival from France was delayed by his being stranded at Elsinor in Denmark, Potemkin mobilized the Russian Ambassador and various special envoys to get him quickly overland to Petersburg.

  *6 This was an earlier, more proactive version of British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan’s description of politics as ‘Events, dear boy, events.’

  *7 ‘Blessed is he who does not go to the council of the ungodly.’

  PART SEVEN

  The Apogee

  1787–1790

  23

  THE MAGICAL THEATRE

  Louis XIV would have been jealous of his sister Catherine II, or he would have married her…The Empress received me…She recalled to my mind a thousand things that monarchs alone can remember for their memory is always excellent.

  Prince de Ligne

  On 7 December 1786, Francisco de Miranda, aged thirty-seven, a cultured, cynical and rakish revolutionary of dubious Creole nobility, who had been cashiered from the Spanish army and was travelling from Constantinople to raise support for a free Venezuela, awaited Potemkin in Kherson. The whole town was preparing for the arrival of the Prince, who was on his final tour of inspection before the visit of Catherine II and the Holy Roman Emperor to his territories. Everyone was waiting. The cannons were primed, the troops were drilled. There were rumours that he was on his way, but still the ‘mysterious godhead’, as Miranda called him, did not come. ‘No one knew where he would be going next.’ Waiting for Serenissimus was one of the hallmarks of Potemkin’s power. Nothing could be done without him. The more powerful he became, the more everything stopped in anticipation of his arrival. Potemkin had to be welcomed like a tsar or at least a member of the imperial family – on Catherine’s orders. His whims were unpredictable, his travelling so swift that he could descend on a town without warning – hence everything had to be kept in a state of the highest readiness. ‘You don’t ride,’ Catherine teased him. ‘You fly.’1

  Twenty days later, on 28 December, Miranda was still waiting. Then at sundown ‘the much desired Prince Potemkin’ arrived to the boom of cannons. Soldiers and officials went to pay their respects to the ‘favourite idol’.2 Miranda was taken by his friends to the Prince’s exotic Court, inhabited by all the ‘cretins and respectable people’ Kherson could hold. ‘My goodness, what a bunch of sycophants and crooked rascals,’ wrote Miranda, ‘but anyway what most amused me was the variety of costumes that could be seen there – Cossacks, Greeks, Jews’ – and Caucasian ambassadors in uniforms à la Prusse. Suddenly a giant emerged, bowing here and there, not speaking to anyone. The Venezuelan was introduced to the Prince as a Spanish count (which he was not). Potemkin said little – but his curiosity was aroused.

  On 31 December, Potemkin’s aide summoned Miranda, only for the Venezuelan to find Potemkin taking tea with Prince Charles de Nassau-Siegen.3 ‘Give me strength!’, thought Miranda at the sight of Nassau, whom he knew from Spain and Constantinople, and regarded with the disdain that only one adventurer can feel for another. They had both led tumultuous lives. Miranda had fought for the Spanish as far as afield as Algiers and Jamaica, and knew Washington and Jefferson from his years in America. Nassau-Siegen, aged forty-two, impoverished heir to a tiny principality, become a soldier of fortune at fifteen, joined Bougainville’s expedition of global circumnavigation during which he killed a tiger, tried to make himself king of Ouidah in west Africa,4 and made love to the Queen of Tahiti. On his return, he commanded the unfortunate Franco-Spanish assault on Gibraltar in 1782 and launched a raid on Jersey. Ruthless and reckless in war and intrigue, Nassau moved east. He wooed Princess Sangushko, a Polish widow. Each thought the other was rich. Once they were married, both discovered the other was not as advertised. But it turned out to be a happy marriage of strong characters and they impressed the salons of Warsaw by keeping fifty bears on their Podolian estate to repel Cossacks. Nassau-Siegen had recently become Potemkin’s travelling companion when King Stanislas-Augustus sent him to ask the Prince to bring his Polish clientele to order. But Nassau also hoped to inveigle himself into Potemkin’s favour to win trading rights in Kherson.5

  The Prince was interrogating Miranda about South America when Ribas, his Neapolitan courtier, rushed in and announced that his mistress had arrived. She called herself ‘Countess’ Sevres, but ‘whatever her origins’, wrote Miranda, ‘she is a whore.’ That did not matter: everyone rushed to court her. Her companion was Mademoiselle Guibald, the governess of Potemkin’s nieces and now the itinerant manageress of his southern seraglio. Potemkin kissed his mistress and sat her on his right – ‘he sleeps with her without the slightest ceremony’, noted Miranda. A quintet began playing Boccherini. Over the next few days, the exuberant Potemkin, holding court at ‘Countess’ Sevres’s apartments in his Palace, could not be without the company of his two new friends, Miranda and Nassau-Siegen. Both, in their different ways, were remarkable – Nassau-Siegen was known as the ‘paladin’ of the age and Miranda was the father of South American liberation, so we are lucky that the latter recorded his experiences in his sceptical and unprejudiced diaries. Potemkin even prepared them a fricassee with his own hands while discussing Algerian pirates and Polish aspirations. Miranda was pleased that the courtiers were ‘exploding’ with jealousy at this new friendship.6

  The Prince invited Nassau and Miranda to accompany him on his lightning inspection of the imperial route. Potemkin knew that the success or failure of Catherine’s journey would either make him unassailable – or ruin him. The cabinets of Europe were watching. England, Prussia and the Sublime Porte stirred uneasily as Potemkin created new cities and fleets to threaten Constantinople. The Empress’s Crimean
trip had been delayed because of plague, but there was always a suspicion that it could not take place because nothing in the south had been done – ‘there are people who supposed’, Cobenzl told Joseph, ‘that all necessary to make the tour cannot be ready’.7

  At 10 p.m. on 5 January 1787, Potemkin, Miranda and Nassau set off, crossing frozen rivers at high speed – three of the most extraordinary men of their epoch in one carriage. They galloped all night, thrice changing horses, stopping at a house of Potemkin’s on the way, to reach Perekop, the gateway to the Crimea, at 8 a.m., having covered 160 miles in twenty hours.8 They crossed short distances in a roomy travelling coach, but since it was now midwinter they often used kibitkas (light carriages) mounted on sleighs – their wheels were removed – to glide swiftly over the snowy steppes, almost alone. Travelling in a kibitka was like lying in a space capsule: ‘they are exactly like cradles, the head having windows to the front’, Lady Craven recalled. ‘I can sit, or lie, at length, and feel in one like an overgrown baby, comfortably defended from the cold by pillows and blankets.’ The rough terrain and high speed made it even more risky. Passengers were subjected to continuous ‘shaking and violent thumps…the hardest head might be broken. I was overturned twice.’ But the Russian postillions thought nothing of it: they just got silently off their horses, set the carriage up again and ‘never ask if the carriage is hurt’.9 They would then hurtle away again.

  The Prince inspected the Crimea, where Miranda saw the new fleet, troops, cities and plantations. He admired the palaces prepared for the Empress at Simferopol, Bakhchisaray, Sebastopol and Karasubazaar, and the English gardens that William Gould was laying out around them. When they arrived at Sebastopol, the officers insisted on giving a ball for the Prince, who blushed when a toast was given in his honour. Miranda laughed at some of the officers, who ‘jumped and hopped about’ like ‘Parisian petit maîtres’. They then inspected Inkerman before galloping back to Simferopol, where the travellers went hunting for two days as Potemkin worked.10