Potemkin lived splendidly in the misery of Elisabethgrad in a wooden palace beside the old fortress. Foreign volunteers – Spaniards, Piedmontese, Portuguese and especially French aristocrats – poured into the frozen town along with a ‘vile troop of subaltern adventurers’. On 12 January 1788, Roger, Comte de Damas, having run away from France to find gloire, arrived to offer his services. Aged just twenty-three, with a shock of black curls, graceful and fearless, Talleyrand’s cousin was the lover of the Marquise de Coigny, a sometime mistress of Ligne whom Marie-Antoinette called ‘queen of Paris’. On arrival, he asked for his mistress’s friend Ligne. Up in the castle, he was told. Thence he was directed to Potemkin’s palace. He passed two guards and entered an immense hall, full of orderlies. This led to a long suite that was as brightly lit as a ‘fête in some capital city’.
The first room he saw was full of adjutants awaiting Potemkin; in the second, Sarti conducted his orchestra of horns; in the third, thirty to forty generals surrounded a huge billiard table.19 On the left, Serenissimus gambled with a niece and a general. This Court was ‘not inferior to a lot of Sovereigns of Europe’. Russian generals were so servile that, if Potemkin dropped something, twenty of them scrummaged to pick it up.20 The Prince rose to meet Damas, sat him at his side and invited him to dinner with Ligne and his niece at a small table, while the generals ate at a bigger one. From then on, Damas dined with Potemkin every day for three months of luxury and impatience.21 Ligne was the consolation of the foreigners – ‘a child in society, Lovelace with the women’. There was no shortage.
Potemkin could never bear war without women. He was soon joined for the winter by a coterie of goddesses, all in their late teens or early twenties, who came to meet their husbands in the army. There was the Russian Aphrodite – Princess Ekaterina Dolgorukaya, wife of an officer and daughter of Prince Fyodor Bariatinsky, one of Catherine’s senior courtiers. She was acclaimed for her ‘beauty, grace, fine tastes, delicate tact, humour and talent’. Then there was the lissom and wanton Ekaterina Samoilova, wife of Potemkin’s nephew and daughter of Prince Sergei Trubetskoi. She was the ‘most adorable woman’, with whom Ligne was soon in love and writing poems that catch the grimness of life there: ‘Dromedaries, horses; Zaporogians, sheep; They’re all we meet here.’22 The third of this graceful troika was Pavel Potemkin’s wife, Praskovia.23 Ségur teased Potemkin from Petersburg on his affair with a girl with ‘beautiful black eyes with whom it is claimed you try the Twelve Labours of Hercules’.24 Damas said Potemkin ‘subordinated the art of war, the science of politics and the government of the kingdom to his particular passions’.25 This galaxy of Venuses revolved around Potemkin: who was to be the next sultana-in-chief?
Potemkin and Ligne tormented each other: Potemkin was pressuring the Austrians to enter the war ‘against our common enemy’.26 Ligne waved one of Joseph’s letters, which contained a war plan, and demanded Potemkin’s strategy. Potemkin delayed, and after two weeks Ligne claimed he was fobbed off with the statement: ‘With the help of God I’ll attack everything that is between the Bug and the Dniester.’ This was another Ligne lie. In an unpublished letter, Potemkin had quite clearly laid out the Russian plan: ‘We’ll undertake the siege of Ochakov, while the army of the Ukraine covers Bender, and the Caucasus and Kuban corps would fight the mountain tribes and Ottomans to the east.27
Ligne however did not exaggerate Serenissimus’ impossible moodiness towards him: they were ‘sometimes fine, sometimes bad, arguing at daggers drawn or uncontested favourite, sometimes gambling with him, talking or not talking, staying up until six in the morning’. Ligne said he was the nurse for a ‘spoilt child’ and a malicious one at that. But Potemkin was equally fed up with Ligne’s ‘villainous ingratitude’, because his Cabinet Noir had opened all Ligne’s lying letters to his friends. Serenissimus grumbled to Catherine that the ‘jockey diplomatique’ could not make up his mind: ‘in his eyes, I am sometimes Thersites and sometimes Achilles’, the louche Thersites of Troilus and Cressida or the heroic Achilles of the Iliad. It was a love–hate relationship.28
Between conducting adulteries, laughing at dromedaries and playing billiards, Potemkin was achieving a miracle ready for the next year. First he was awaiting his reserves and his levy of recruits, so that gradually an army of about 40,000–50,000 assembled in Elisabethgrad. Across the Mediterranean, Potemkin’s officers tried to recruit more men, particularly from Greece and Italy: for example, on the island of Corsica it is said that a young man offered himself for service to a Russian recruiter, General I.A. Zaborovsky. The Corsican demanded Russian rank equivalent to his position in the Garde Nationale Corse. He even wrote to his General Tamara about it.*4 But his request was refused and he remained in France. The name of this abortive recruit to Potemkin’s army was Napoleon Bonaparte.29
Serenissimus was creating the Cossack Host he had been planning ever since destroying the Zaporogian Sech. An honorary Zaporogian himself, Potemkin had a ‘passion for the Cossacks’. His entourage was filled with them, often old friends from the First Turkish War like Sidor Bely, Chepega and Golavaty. Potemkin believed that the old Cuirassier heavy cavalry was outdated and inconvenient in southern wars. The Cossacks had copied the horsemanship of the Tartars and now Potemkin had his light cavalry emulate the Cossacks. But he also decided to reharness the Zaporogian Cossacks, tempting back their brethren who had defected to the Turks. ‘Try to enlist the Cossacks,’ he ordered Bely. ‘I’ll check them all myself.’ He also filled up their ranks by recruiting new Cossacks from among Poles, Old Believers and even coachmen and petit bourgeois. Overcoming Catherine’s caution, he founded the new ‘Black Sea and Ekaterinoslav Host’ under Bely and his Cossack protégés. They were later renamed the Kuban Cossacks, Russia’s second largest Host (the Don remained bigger) until the Revolution. It was Potemkin who made the Cossacks the pillars of the Tsarist regime.30
Potemkin decided to arm the Jews against the Turks. This ‘singular project’, probably his Jewish friend Zeitlin’s idea, spawned in some rabbinical debate with the Prince, started as a cavalry squadron raised among the Jews of his Krichev estate. In December, he created a Jewish regiment called the Israelovsky, a word reminiscent of the Izmailovsky Guards. But that was where the similarities ended. Commanded by Prince Ferdinand of Brunswick, their ultimate aim was to liberate Jerusalem for the Jews, just as Potemkin was to conquer Constantinople for the Orthodox. This sign of Potemkin’s unique philo-semitism and of Zeitlin’s influence was an awkward idea given Russian and especially Cossack anti-semitism, but it was surely the first attempt by a foreign power to arm the Jews since Titus destroyed the Temple.
The Prince wanted his Israelovsky to be half-infantry, half-cavalry, the latter to be Jewish Cossacks with Zaporogian lances: ‘we already have one squadron’, observed Ligne to Joseph II. ‘Thanks to the shortness of their stirrups, their beards come down to their knees and their fear on horseback makes them like monkeys.’ Joseph, who had loosened the restrictions of his own Jews, was probably amused.
By March 1788, thirty-five of these bearded Jewish Cossacks were being trained. Soon there were two squadrons, and Ligne told Potemkin there were plenty more in Poland. Ligne was sceptical, but he admitted he had seen excellent Jewish postmasters and even postillions. The Israelovsky evidently went out on patrol with the cavalry because Ligne wrote that they were as terrified of their own horses as those of the enemy. But five months later Potemkin cancelled the Israelovsky. Ligne joked that he did not dare continue them for fear of ‘getting mixed up with the Bible’. So ended this rare experiment that says a great deal about Potemkin’s originality and imagination.*5 Ligne thought the Jewish Cossacks were ‘too ridiculous’. Instead, Potemkin concentrated on a ‘great number of Zaporogians and other Cossack volunteers’ pouring in to form the new Black Sea Host.31
The ‘Prince–Marshal’, as the foreigners called him, was now repairing the damaged fleet while preparing a huge new flotilla to fight in the Lim
an beneath Ochakov. The Russians were exposed in the Liman. The nature of this shallow estuary meant that Potemkin would have to fight a different sort of war with a different sort of fleet. Potemkin and his admiral Mordvinov turned to the most ingenious shipbuilder they knew: Samuel Bentham’s vermicular barges had been left behind and forgotten when the Empress’s tour headed for Kherson, leaving him to tag along behind.*6 Now he was needed again, but Serenissimus had forgotten to pay him. He was swiftly paid, but Potemkin was so embarrassed about the debts that he hardly spoke to Bentham. ‘By order of His Highness’, Sam was enrolled into the navy32 – though ‘I had rather continue on terra firma.’33 Potemkin ordered him to create a light flotilla that could fight the Turkish fleet in the Liman.34 While Potemkin appeared to be lazing around at Elisabethgrad having tantrums with Ligne, the archives show that he was driving the creation of this fleet with all his force. ‘Fit them up completely as quickly as possible with rigging and all their armaments,’ he ordered Mordvinov. ‘Don’t lose any time over it.’35
Joseph now accepted the casus foederis and launched a bungled pre-emptive strike against the Ottoman fortress of Belgrade in today’s Serbia. The operation collapsed farcically when Austrian commandos, disguised in special uniforms, got lost in the fog. Potemkin was ‘furious’36 with Ligne about this military buffoonery, but it let the Russians off the hook. ‘It’s not very good for them,’ Catherine told Potemkin, ‘but it is good for us.’ Joseph fielded his 245,000 men but went on the defensive across central Europe, which at least restrained the Turks, giving Potemkin time to fight the Battle of the Liman.37
This strategy drove the Austrians to despair. Potemkin was adamant to Catherine that ‘nobody can encourage me to undertake something when there’s no profit in it and nobody can discourage me when there’s a useful opportunity’.38 Ligne tried to persuade him, but Potemkin laughed maliciously: ‘Do you think you can come here and lead me by the nose?’39 The Austrian general Prince Frederick Joseph de Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld failed to take Khotin too. A second lunge for Belgrade never even got started. The Austrian war was not going well.40
So Potemkin treated Ligne to two unpublished strategic memoranda that the ‘jockey diplomatique’ does not mention in his famous letters because they firmly restore the balance of Austro-Russian achievements: ‘It seems to me that on several occasions one has not been on guard enough,’ and Serenissimus proceeded to explain how the Turks fought: ‘They like to envelope their enemy on all sides…’. Potemkin’s advice was to concentrate forces, not spread them out in thin cordons, as Joseph was doing. Whether Joseph ever saw these documents, he did exactly what Potemkin warned him against, with disastrous results.41
Ligne could do nothing but accuse the Prince of the vainglorious pursuit of medals and lying about his victories. When a courier arrived with news of a victory in the Caucasus, Potemkin beamed: ‘See if I do nothing! I’ve just killed 10,000 Circassians, Abyssinians, Imeretians and Georgians and I’ve already killed 5,000 Turks at Kinburn.’ Ligne said this was a lie, but the Prince’s generals Tekeli and Pavel Potemkin had won a series of victories across the Kuban in September and November against the Ottoman ally, Sheikh Mansour.42 Ligne simply had no conception of the breadth of Potemkin’s command.*7
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It was now Catherine’s turn to lose her confidence for a moment and Potemkin’s to encourage her in his belief that the two of them were specially blessed. Christ would help her – as He had always done before. ‘There were times’, he reassured her, ‘when all the escape-routes seem to be blocked. And then all of a sudden, chance intervened. Do rely on Him.’ He thanked her for the fur coat she had sent. She missed him – especially in a crisis: ‘without you, I feel as though I’m missing a hand and I get into trouble which I’d never get into with you. I keep fearing something is being missed.’43 Later in the spring, she wrote a postscriptum to a short note, thanking him for his reassurances. ‘I thought it would be nice to tell you that I love you, my friend, very much and without ceremony.’ They were still so close that they usually thought the same way, and even suffered from the same ailments.44
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A Polish delegation now arrived in Elisabethgrad: Potemkin kept them waiting for days and then shocked them by receiving them in a dressing gown without breeches. Nonetheless, Potemkin paid serious attention to the problem of Poland. The sprawling Commonwealth was moving towards the so-called ‘Four Year Sejm’, the long parliament that presided over the Polish Revolution and overthrew the Russian protectorate. This was what Potemkin and King Stanislas-Augustus’ proposed alliance might have avoided. ‘Make Poland join us in the war,’ the Prince urged Catherine.45 He offered the Poles 50,000 rifles to equip Polish forces, which would include 12,000 Polish cavalry to fight the Turks. Potemkin wanted to command some of the Poles himself – ‘at least a single brigade. I am as much of a Pole as they are,’ he protested, referring to his Smolensk origins and indigenat as a Polish nobleman.
This offer to command Polish troops was not a casual one. He was still developing his flexible plans for dealing with Poland and his own future under Paul, partly based on his new Podolian estates.46 In any case, Catherine distrusted the plan, perhaps nervous about his vast Polish lands and schemes. She would only propose a treaty that specifically preserved the weak, chaotic Polish Constitution that served Russian ends. It was never signed.
There was always comedy with Serenissimus, even in war. When his Cossacks captured four Tartars, the prisoners expected to be killed. But Potemkin cheerfully had them thrown into a barrel of water and then announced they had been baptized. When a half-senile Frenchman arrived, purporting to be a siege expert, the Prince questioned him, only to learn that the sage had forgotten most of his knowledge. ‘I should like to peep…and study the works that I have forgotten again,’ said the old man. Potemkin, ‘always kind and amiable’ to characters, laughed and told him to relax: ‘Don’t kill yourself with all that reading…’.47
Samuel Bentham, working under Admiral Mordvinov and General Suvorov at Kherson, threw himself into creating a rowing flotilla, using all his ingenuity.*8 He adapted Catherine’s ‘cursed’ imperial barges into gunboats, but his real work was to renovate a graveyard of old cannon and fit them on to any light boats that he could either convert or construct. ‘I flatter myself I am the principal agent, filling out the Galleys and smaller vessels,’ he wrote.48
Bentham’s masterpiece was to arm his ships with far heavier cannon than usual on most gunboats.49 ‘The employment of great guns of 36 or even 48 pounds on such small vessels as ships’ long boats’, Bentham boasted justifiably to his brother, ‘was entirely my idea.’50 It was to Potemkin’s credit that, when he came to inspect in October, he immediately understood the significance of Bentham’s idea and adopted it in the construction of all the frigates and gunboats, including twenty-five Zaporogian chaiki51 being built separately by his factotum Faleev. ‘They respect the calibre of guns in the fleet, not the quantity,’52 Potemkin explained to Catherine. He managed to overcome his awkwardness and thank Bentham publicly for all he had done.53 Bentham was delighted.
By the spring, Potemkin had created a heavy-armed light flotilla of about a hundred boats out of almost nothing.54 Even Ligne had to agree that ‘it needed a great merit of the Prince to have imagined, created and equipped’ the fleet so fast.55 The birth of the Liman fleet – another ‘beloved child’ – was perhaps the ‘most essential service Potemkin rendered to Russia’.56 Who was to command it? Nassau-Siegen arrived at Elisabethgrad in the New Year eager to serve. Potemkin enjoyed Nassau’s pedigree – from the bed of the Queen of Tahiti to the raid on Jersey during the American War – but he knew his limitations. ‘Almost a sailor’,57 he called Nassau – which made him perfect for his almost-fleet in the Liman. On 26 March, he placed Nassau, whose ‘bravery’ was ‘renowned’, in command of the rowing flotilla.58
Potemkin
inspected and reinspected maniacally: ‘The extent of his authority, the fear he inspired and the prompt execution of his wishes made his visits of inspections seldom necessary.’59 By late March, everything was almost ready. ‘Then we can begin the dance,’ declared Nassau.60 But, just as everything seemed arranged with the command, an American admiral appeared on the Liman.
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‘Paul Jones has arrived,’ Catherine told Grimm on 25 April 1788. ‘I saw him today. I think he’ll do marvellous things for us.’61 Catherine fantasized that Jones would slice straight through to Constantinople. John Paul Jones, born the son of a gardener on a Scottish island, was the most celebrated naval commander of his day. He is still regarded as one of the founders of the US Navy. His tiny squadron of ships had terrorized the British coast during the War of American Independence: his wildest exploit was to raid the Scottish coast, taking hostage the inhabitants of a country house. This earned him the enviable reputation in America as a hero of liberty, in France as a dashing heart-throb and in England as a despicable pirate. Prints were sold of him; English nannies scared their children with tales of this bloodsoaked ogre. When the War of Independence ended in 1783, Jones, living in Paris, found himself at a loose end. Grimm, Thomas Jefferson and the King of Poland’s Virginian, Lewis Littlepage, had all helped direct him to Catherine, who knew that Russia needed sailors – and who could never resist a Western celebrity. Catherine is usually credited with hiring Jones without consulting Potemkin. But the archives show that Potemkin was simultaneously negotiating with him. ‘In case this officer is now in France,’ he told Simolin, the Russian envoy in Paris on 5 March, ‘I ask Your Excellency to get him to come as early as possible so that we can use his talents in the opening of the campaign.’62
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