*5 There were sound military reasons for not storming until the fleet had control over the Liman and until artillery had arrived, which did not happen until August.
*6 Potemkin was not alone in delaying: when Ligne rode off to join Rumiantsev-Zadunaisky, he found him just as inactive, while Count Nikolai Saltykov ostentatiously delayed his attack on Khotin. It was Russian policy as well as Russian habit – as Kutuzov was to demonstrate to such effect in 1812.
*7 Back at Gatchina, Grand Duke Paul’s microcosm of Prussian paradomania, the Tsarevich was disgusted by this harem at war and sneeringly demanded where in Vauban’s siege instructions did it say that nieces were necessary to take cities. This was rich since Paul himself had asked to take his wife to the war with him in 1787.
*8 Colonel Bentham was to command two battalions on the Chinese–Mongolian border, create a regimental school, discover new lands, form alliances with Mongols, Kalmyks and Kirghiz and open trading with Japan and Alaska. He also devised a Potemkinian plan to defeat China with 100,000 men. In 1790 he headed back via Petersburg to Potemkin’s headquarters in Bender to report to the Prince and get permission to return to England, which he finally did. There ended a unique adventure in Anglo-Russian relations.
*9 But first, on 7 November, Potemkin ordered his Zaporogians to take the island of Berezan, which offered Ochakov a last potential source of support and provisions: the Cossacks rowed there in their ‘seagulls’ and took the island, making their distinctive menacing cries. They captured twenty-seven cannons and two months of provisions for Ochakov – showing it was a sound decision.
*10 The town no longer exists except for one building, a former mosque that has been converted into a museum. It is a typical mark of the blind Soviet prejudice against Potemkin that the museum is dedicated to Suvorov. In fact, Suvorov was not only not in command at the storming of Ochakov, he was not even present there. Yet the museum hails him as its victor and genius and barely mentions Potemkin. Such are the absurdities of the central state planning of truth.
28
MY SUCCESSES ARE YOURS
We shall glorify Potemkin
We shall plait him a bouquet in our hearts.
Russian soldiers’ marching song, ‘The Moldavian Campaign of 1790’
The favour of the Empress was agreeable;
And though the duty waxed a little hard,
Young people at his time of life should be able
To come off handsomely in that regard.
Lord Byron, Don Juan, Canto X: 22
On 11 February 1789, two hundred Ottoman banners from Ochakov were marched past the Winter Palace by a squadron of Life-Guards accompanied by four blaring trumpeters. The parade was followed by a splendid dinner in Potemkin’s honour.1 ‘The Prince we see is extremely affable and gracious to everyone – we celebrate his arrival every day,’ Zavadovsky sourly told Rumiantsev-Zadunaisky. ‘All faith is in one person.’2 Potemkin received another 100,000 roubles for the Taurida Palace, a diamond-studded baton and, most importantly of all, the retirement of Rumiantsev-Zadunaisky, commander of the Ukraine Army. The Prince was appointed commander of both armies.
Potemkin liberally distributed honours to his men: he insisted Suvorov, whom he brought to Petersburg with him, should receive a plume of diamonds for his hat with a ‘K’ for Kinburn.3 He ordered his favoured general straight down to Rumiantsev’s old command, where the Turks were already launching raids.*1 The Prince promised Suvorov his own separate corps.4
The festivities could dispel neither the tension of Russia’s international position nor Catherine’s private anguish. After the dinner that night, Catherine quarrelled with her favourite, Mamonov. ‘Tears,’ noted Khrapovitsky, ‘the evening was spent in bed.’ Mamonov was behaving ominously: he was often ill, unfriendly or just absent. When Catherine asked the Prince about it, he replied, ‘Haven’t you been jealous of Princess Shcherbatova,’ (a maid-of-honour) adding, ‘Isn’t there an affaire d’amour?’ He then repeated ‘a hundred times’: ‘Oh Matushka, spit on him.’5 Potemkin could hardly have warned her more clearly about her lover. But Catherine, tired and almost sixty, did not listen.
She was so used to hearing what she wanted and so accustomed to her routine with Mamonov that she did not rise to Potemkin’s warnings. Besides, Serenissimus turned against every favourite at one time or another. So the trouble with Mamonov continued – ‘more tears’ recorded Khrapovitsky the next day. Catherine spent all day in bed and her consort came to the rescue. ‘After dinner, Prince G.A. Potemkin of Taurida acted as peacemaker’ between the Empress and Mamonov.6 But he only papered over the cracks in the relationship. Nor could the Prince solve all of Russia’s problems.
The leadership was divided over Russia’s worsening position. While it held its own on two fronts against the Turks and Swedes, Russia’s power was haemorrhaging in Poland. The Polish ‘Four Year Sejm’, now encouraged by Berlin, was enthusiastically, if naively, dismantling the Russian protectorate and throwing itself into the arms of Prussia. ‘Great hatred’7 of Russia was driving Poland towards reform of its constitution and war with Catherine. Prussia cynically backed the idealism of the Polish ‘Patriots’ – even though Frederick William’s true interest was the partition, not the reform, of Poland.
That was not all: Prussia and England were also working hard to keep Sweden and the Turks in the war. Pitt now hoped to recruit Poland to join a ‘federative system’ against the two imperial powers. This alarmed Vienna, where Joseph’s health was failing – he was ‘vomiting blood’. The Austrians fretted that Potemkin had become pro-Prussian. All Joseph could suggest to his Ambassador was to flatter the vanity of the ‘all-powerful being’.8
So should Russia risk war with Prussia or come to an agreement with it, which meant making peace with the Turks, betraying the shaky Austrians and probably partitioning Poland, which would be compensated with Ottoman territory? This was the Gordian knot that Potemkin’s long-awaited arrival was meant to cut.
Potemkin had for some time been advising Catherine to soften her obstinate contempt towards Frederick William. The Council expected him to try to persuade her to cut a deal because he knew that Russia could not fight Prussia and Poland as well as Turkey and Sweden. Since it was not yet time to make peace with the Sultan, Potemkin had to avoid war elsewhere. Serenissimus did not want a return to Panin’s Prussian system, so he advised Catherine: ‘Provoke the Prussian king to take whatever from Poland.’9 If he lulled the Prussian King into revealing the real greed of his Polish masquerade, the Poles would lose their love for Prussia.10 ‘Sincerity’, he told his ally Bezborodko,11 ‘is unnecessary in politics.’12
* * *
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This visit also saw the end of his friendship with the French envoy, Ségur, who had supported the criticisms of Ligne and Cobenzl during Ochakov. Ségur was hurt: ‘Your friendship for me has cooled a bit, mine won’t ever imitate it. I’m devoted to you for life.’13 They had been discussing a Quadruple Alliance with the Bourbons and Habsburgs,14 but Britain was ever stronger, France ever weaker. ‘I would have advised my Sovereign to ally with Louis the Fat, Louis the Young, Saint Louis, clever Louis XI, wise Louis XII, Louis the Great, even with Louis le Bien-Aimé,’ Serenissimus teased Ségur, ‘but not with Louis the Democrat.’15
Poor Ségur, playing chess with the Prince, had to endure an entire evening of anti-French comic sketches from his Court ‘fool’ – Russian nobles still had clowns in their households. But he got his own back by bribing the fool to tease Potemkin about Russian military blunders. The Prince overturned the table and threw the chess pieces at the fleeing buffoon, but he saw Ségur’s joke and the evening ended ‘most gaily’.16
Ségur was about to turn detective, trawling the brothels and taverns of Petersburg on behalf of Potemkin’s American ‘pirate’, Jones. In April, just as Potemkin was about to make Jones ‘th
e happiest man alive’ with a new job, the American was arrested and accused of paedophile rape. The story has the seedy gleam of a modern sex scandal. Jones appealed to Serenissimus: ‘A bad woman has accused me of violating her daughter!’ Worse, the daughter was said to be nine years old. He beseeched Potemkin: ‘Shall it be said that, in Russia, a wretched woman, who eloped from her husband and family, stole away her daughter, lives here in a house of ill repute and leads a debauched and adulterous life, has found credit enough, on a simple complaint, unsupported by any proof, to affect the honour of a general officer of reputation, who has merited and received the decorations of America, France and this empire?’ Jones, once a Parisian Lothario, admitted to Potemkin, ‘I love women’ and ‘the pleasures that one only obtains from that sex, but to get such things by force, is horrible to me’.17
Potemkin, deluged with responsibilities and already disliking Jones, did not reply. The capital became a desert to Jones. Detective Ségur was the only friend who supported his old American comrade and resolved to investigate who had framed him. He discovered that Jones had told Potemkin the truth – the accusing mother was a procuress who traded ‘a vile traffic in young girls’. The girl, Katerina Goltzwart, was not nine but twelve, if not fourteen. She sold butter to guests at Jones’s hotel, the London Tavern. In his statement to the chief of police three days after the incident, Jones admitted that the ‘depraved girl’ came several times to his room. He always gave her money. He claimed that he had not taken her virginity but ‘each time she came chez moi, she lent herself with the best grace to all a man could want of her’.
Ségur asked Potemkin to reinstate Jones and not charge him. The latter was possible but not the former. ‘Thanks for what you tried to do for Paul Jones, even though you did not achieve what I wanted,’ Ségur wrote to the Prince. ‘Paul Jones is no more guilty than I, and a man of his rank has never suffered such humiliation, through the accusation of a woman, whose husband certifies she is a pimp and whose daughter solicits the inns.’18 Thanks to Ségur’s investigations and Potemkin’s tepid help, Jones was not prosecuted and was received by Catherine one last time on 26 June 1789. Who framed Jones? Potemkin was above such vendettas. The English officers hated the American corsair enough to frame him, but Ségur the detective concluded that Prince de Nassau-Siegen was the culprit.
Once back in Paris, Jones wrote a vainglorious account of the Liman and bombarded Potemkin with complaints about the medals he was owed. ‘Time will teach you, my lord,’ he wrote to Serenissimus on 13 July 1790, ‘that I am neither a mountebank nor a swindler but a man loyal and true.’19
* * *
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On 27 March, the pacific, wine-quaffing Sultan Abdul-Hamid I died. This made things worse, not better, for Russia because Selim III, his eighteen-year-old successor, was an aggressive, intelligent reformer whose determination to fight was buttressed by Moslem fanatics and the ambassadors of Prussia, England and Sweden. Austria and Russia wished to discuss peace with Selim in order to ward off a possible Prussian intervention in the Turkish War – but the augurs were not encouraging. The Austrian Chancellor, Kaunitz, wrote to Potemkin about Selim’s ferocity, alleging that when he had once spotted a Polish Jew on the streets of Istanbul wearing the (wrong) yellow shoes, he had had him beheaded before the unfortunate had a chance to explain that he was a foreigner.20 Peace could be won only on the battlefields in Potemkin’s next campaign: no wonder Catherine was so anxious.
Potemkin and Catherine still flirted with one another. After her birthday reception at Paul’s palace on 12 April, he sweetly boosted her flagging morale by complimenting the ‘mother of her subjects, especially to me’ and the ‘angelic virtues’ of the ‘first-born eagle nestling’, her grandson Alexander.21 Before he left he gave her an exquisite present, ‘a so-called bagetelle,’ she wrote to him, ‘which is of rare beauty and, more to the point, as inimitable as you yourself. I marvel at both – it and you. You really are the personification of wit.’22
On 6 May 1789, having laid plans with Catherine for every eventuality, including wars against Prussia and Poland, the Prince of Taurida left Tsarskoe Selo for the south. The old partners were not to meet again for almost two years.23
* * *
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Serenissimus raced to the front, where he divided the combined Ukraine and Ekaterinoslav armies – about 60,000 men – into his own main army and four corps. The strategy was to fight round the Black Sea in a south-westerly direction through the Principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia (today’s Moldova and Rumania), taking the fortresses on each river: Dniester, Pruth, then Danube. Potemkin’s army was to cover the Dniester until the Turks were diminished enough to begin fighting up the Danube into modern Bulgaria – to the walls of Constantinople.24
The main Austrian army, under one of their many Scottish officers, Field-Marshal Loudon, was to attack Belgrade (in today’s Serbia), while Prince Frederick Joseph of Saxe-Coburg-Saarlfeld co-operated with the Russians in Wallachia and Moldavia. The most important force, except Potemkin’s own, was Suvorov’s ‘flying corps’, the Third, which was to protect the ‘hinge’ with the Austrians on the Russian extreme left. Suvorov balanced himself across three parallel rivers – the Sereth, Berlad and Pruth – and waited.
The new Grand Vizier Hassan-Pasha Genase commanded an Ottoman army of 100,000: his strategy was to smash the Austrians where the link between the allies was weakest around the rivers Pruth and Sereth, close to Suvorov’s ‘hinge’, while a new armada landed on the Crimea. Ex-Capitan-Pasha Ghazi Hassan, the white-bearded Crocodile of Sea Battles, took to the land in command of a 30,000-strong corps that was to distract Potemkin’s main army while the Vizier broke through. The Turkish manoeuvres were unusually adept. The Russians were vigilant. On 11 May, Potemkin crossed the Bug, massed his forces at Olviopol and then advanced towards the powerful Ottoman fortress of Bender on the Dniester.
In the West, the world was changing. Potemkin was settling into his new headquarters at Olviopol when the Parisian mob stormed the Bastille on 3/14 July. The National Assembly passed the Declaration of the Rights of Man on 15/26 August.25 The Polish Patriots, who were opposed to Russia, were encouraged by the French Revolution – Warsaw enjoyed a febrile fiesta of freedom and hope. Poland demanded that Russia withdraw its troops and magazines. Potemkin carefully monitored Poland, yet he had no choice but to comply.26 He continued to pursue his own Polish policies, vigorously expanding his Black Sea Cossacks to act as an Orthodox spearhead which would raise the pro-Russian eastern area of the Commonwealth when the time came.27
Potemkin ‘flew’ between his headquarters at Olviopol, where Russia, Poland and Turkey met, and Kherson, Ochakov and Elisabethgrad, checking and inspecting his vast front until he had exhausted himself with ‘haemorrhoids and fever’, as he told Catherine, ‘but nothing can stop me except death’.28 She encouraged him by sending one of his rewards for Ochakov, the diamond-studded field-marshal’s baton.
The Grand Vizier stealthily pushed forward, with a corps of 30,000, to strike at Coburg’s Austrians before they could join up with the Russians. At this vital moment, a long and anguished secret letter arrived from a frantic empress. Just as the Turks probed the weakest point of Potemkin’s front, Catherine’s relationship with Mamonov disintegrated in the most humiliating way.
* * *
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Catherine finally understood that Mamonov was not happy: it is hard to blame him. The favourite always complained that life at Court was like surviving in the jungle.29 His role as a companion to an older woman bored him, now that he was accustomed to luxury. Potemkin blocked any political role for him – on his last visit, the Prince had vetoed Mamonov’s request to be a Court vice-chancellor. His sexual duties may have become tedious, even distasteful.
Catherine was turning sixty. She remained publicly majestic, privately simple and playful. ‘I saw her once or twice a week for ten years,’ wrote Masso
n, ‘every time with renewed admiration.’ Her modesty with her staff was admirable: Countess Golovina recalled how she and her fellow maids-of-honour were happily eating dinner when they noted that the ‘beautiful’ hand of the servant who handed them their plates wore a ‘superb solitaire ring’. They looked up to find it was the Empress herself. She took care with her appearance, keeping her good skin and fine hands. Her now white hair was carefully dressed – but she was exceedingly fat; her legs were often so swollen that they ‘lost their shape’. Her architects, including Cameron at Tsarskoe Selo, and nobles whose houses she visited, gradually installed pentes douces to make it easier for her to enter buildings. Her voice was hoarse, her nose may have become more ‘utterly Greek’ or aquiline, she was cursed with wind and indigestion, and she had probably lost some of her teeth. She was older,*2 and time exaggerated both her affectionate nature and her emotional neediness.30
The Empress wrote Mamonov a letter generously offering to release him and arrange his happiness by marrying him to one of the richest heiresses in Russia. His reply devastated her. He confessed he had been in love with Princess Daria Shcherbatova, a maid-of-honour, for a ‘year and a half’ and asked to marry her. Catherine gasped and then collapsed at this shameless betrayal of her trust and feelings. Mamonov rushed after her, threw himself at her feet and revealed everything. Catherine’s friend Anna Naryshkina shouted at the favourite. Deeply wounded but always decent to her lovers, Catherine agreed that he could marry Shcherbatova.
At first, she concealed this crisis from Potemkin, probably out of embarrassment and to see if a relationship developed with a new young person close to her. But on 29 June she told her staff she was going to write to Potemkin at Olviopol. By the time it reached him, she had supervised Mamonov’s marriage on 1 July: the groom received 2,250 peasants and 100,000 roubles. Catherine wept at the wedding. ‘I’ve never been a tyrant to anybody,’ she told Potemkin sadly, ‘and I hate compulsion – is it possible you didn’t know me to such an extent, and that the generosity of my character disappeared from your mind, and you considered me a wretched egotist? You would have healed me by telling me the truth.’ She remembered Potemkin’s warnings – ‘Matushka, spit on him’ – which she had ignored. ‘But if you knew about his love, why didn’t you tell me about it frankly?’31
Catherine the Great & Potemkin Page 65