Potemkin watched from Bender because, if Ismail did not fall, he did not wish the prestige of the entire army to be affected.3 The Prince saw no need to live more austerely at this crucial moment. On the contrary, he continued to suffer from a surfeit of choice on the feminine front. His ardour for Princess Dolgorukaya was cooling. The rising ‘sultana’, Madame de Witte, remained at his side. Countess Branicka was said to be on her way, and ‘Madame L.’ – the wife of General Lvov – ‘is coming and bringing a young girl of fifteen or sixteen, beautiful as Cupid’, a courtesan and the ‘Prince’s latest victim’, reported a well-informed if hostile witness.4 He appeared as sybaritic as ever. He was ‘enchanted’ when Richelieu, Langeron and young Ligne arrived in Bender, but he did not mention whether he was going to storm Ismail or not. Langeron asked, but ‘no one opened their mouths’. The three joined the army at Ismail.5
Unbeknown to the generals in Ismail and most historians of the siege, the Prince had already decided that the commanders on the scene were not capable of taking the city. He had therefore summoned the one man he knew could take it, Suvorov. ‘With God’s help, capture the town,’ Potemkin wrote to him on 25 November, adding, ‘there are a lot of generals there of equal rank and so it’s turned into a sort of indecisive parliament’. The Prince advised Suvorov that Ismail’s walls on the river side were the weakest and he recommended only two soldiers on the spot: ‘Ribas will help you…and you’ll be pleased with Kutuzov.’ On both counts, posterity would agree with Potemkin’s judgement. ‘Make the arrangements and, with a prayer to God, do it.’6 Suvorov set off immediately for Ismail.
The camp there was a picture of Russian administrative chaos and poor leadership. The Prince had ordered the artillery forward and demanded the capture of the city ‘at any cost’.7 On 25 November (the same day Potemkin had summoned Suvorov), Gudovich chaired a faltering war council at which Ribas demanded a full assault and the others vacillated. Ribas appealed to the Prince, who secretly wrote back, on 28 November, that Suvorov was on his way and so ‘all difficulties will be swept away’. On 2 December, Gudovich held another council and ordered a retreat. Ribas was furious. ‘The comedy is over,’8 wrote a disgusted officer to a friend. They repacked the artillery; the troops began to march away. Ribas appealed to the Prince while his flotilla rowed back to Galatz.9
At Bender, Potemkin maintained his insouciant and debauched façade, never letting on that Suvorov was on his way to take command. He was said to be playing cards with his harem when Madame de Witte, pretending to tell his fortune, foretold he would take Ismail within three weeks. Potemkin laughed that he had a more infallible way than fortune-telling – Suvorov – as if he had just had the idea over cards. Serenissimus enjoyed playing such games with his gullible courtiers – but his obscurity was deliberate. Indeed he boasted to Catherine that he had kept his true intentions from the enemy and his own staff. ‘The slaughterer must never show his knife,’ he once wrote. ‘Secrecy is the soul of war.’10
When news of Gudovich’s withdrawal reached the disdainful Prince, he treated the general to a dose of his sarcasm and appointed him to command the Caucasus and Kuban corps: ‘I can see you had a huge discussion about actions against Ismail but I don’t find anything harmful to the enemy…As you have not seen the Turks at close quarters except after they’ve been captured, I’m sending you General Suvorov who will show you how…’.11 Potemkin knew it was impossible to ‘oversuvorov Suvorov.’
Count Suvorov-Rimniksky approached Ismail, turned back the retreating troops and recalled Ribas’s flotilla. Suvorov entered the camp on 2 December, looking more ‘like a Tartar than the general of a European army’, a little scarecrow riding all alone except for one Cossack orderly.12 Despite (or perhaps because of) his peculiarities, spending nights singing, eating on the floor at odd times and rolling naked on the ground, Suvorov inspired confidence. He reorganized the artillery batteries, oversaw the making of ladders and fascines to fill the ditches, and trained the troops on mock-ups of the walls. Serenissimus waited tensely in Bender – but he deliberately gave Suvorov a narrow escape-route if he really judged Ismail impregnable. This was not uncertainty, simply a sensible reminder to Suvorov not to risk Russian men and prestige if the assault was impossible. After all, the Turks were convinced Ismail really was impregnable.13
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On 7 December, a trumpeter was sent up to the fortress with letters from Potemkin and Suvorov demanding that Ismail surrender to avoid what the Prince called shedding the ‘harmless blood of women and children’.14 Suvorov was more direct: if Ismail resisted, ‘nobody will be spared’.15 The Turks responded defiantly by parading round the ramparts, already decorated by many banners – presenting, thought Richelieu, ‘a most picturesque vision of this multitude of magnificently dressed men’.16 When the Seraskier asked for a ten-day truce, Suvorov rejected this delaying tactic. Ribas planned the assault. After a war council on 9 December, Suvorov ordered the storming of Ismail from all sides – six columns on the land side and four across the Danube. ‘Tomorrow,’ Suvorov told the army, ‘either the Turks or the Russians will be buried at Ismail.’17 The Seraskier, like a voice already beyond the grave, declared: ‘The Danube will stop its course, the heavens will fall to earth before Ismail surrenders.’18
At 3 a.m. on 11 December, the heavens did fall to earth. A sustained artillery barrage pounded the fortress before a rocket zigzagged across the sky to give the order to advance. The Turkish artillery took a murderous toll on the attackers. Ismail was, recalled Langeron, a ‘spectacle of horror and beauty’ as the ramparts were crowned with flames.19 Damas, who commanded a column attacking across the Danube, was one of the first atop the walls: as Potemkin had seen, the river side was weakest. On the land side, the first two columns had broken into the town, but Kutuzov’s spearhead was beaten back twice with terrible losses. Suvorov was supposed to have sent him a note congratulating him on taking Ismail and appointing him its governor. This encouraged him to throw himself at the walls a third and successful time. A priest brandishing a crucifix, with bullets ricocheting off it, brought up the reserve. By the time the sun rose, all the columns were on the ramparts, but several had not yet descended into the streets. Then the Russians poured into Ismail like a ‘torrent that floods the countryside’. The hand-to-hand fighting between 60,000 armed soldiers now reached its bloodiest: even as late as midday, the battle was not decided.20
Ismail assumed the incarnadine horror of a Dantean hell. As the ‘ursomaniacs’ screamed ‘Hurrah’ and ‘Catherine II’, and the Turks fell back, they were overtaken again by the lust for havoc, a fever of blood madness to kill everything they could find. ‘The most horrible carnage followed,’ remembered Damas, ‘the most unequalled butchery. It is no exaggeration to say that the gutters of the town were dyed with blood. Even women and children fell victims to the rage.’ The screams of children did not stop the Russians. A Turk ran out of a building and pointed his gun at Damas, but it did not fire and the ‘poor wretch’ was killed instantly by his men.
Four thousand Tartar horses escaped from the underground stables to stampede over the dead and dying, their frantic hooves pulping the human flesh and shattering the skulls of the dying, until they themselves were butchered. The Seraskier and 4,000 men were still defending the bastion on which his green tent was pitched. When they were about to surrender, an English sailor in Russian service tried to capture the Turkish general and shot him down but was himself pierced with fifteen bayonets. At this the Russians sank into a grim orgy of death, methodically working their way through the entire 4,000 men, of whom not one survived.
The Turks awaited their death with a resignation that Richelieu had never seen. ‘I won’t try to paint the horror which froze all my senses.’ But he managed to save the life of a ten-year-old girl whom he found soaked in blood and surrounded by four women with their throats cut. Two Cossacks were about to kill her when he took her hand and ‘I h
ad the pleasure to see that my little prisoner had no other harm than a light scratch on her face probably from the same sword that had killed her mother.’ A Tartar prince, Kaplan Giray, and his five sons, proud descendants of Genghis Khan, made a last stand in the bastion: the father fell last surrounded by the wreath formed by the bodies of his brave sons.
The massacre resembled a macabre pantomime as the resistance ebbed. The blood-crazed Russians draped themselves in every piece of clothing they could find – masculine or feminine. They stripped their victims before killing them to preserve their clothes. They pillaged the Turkish shops, so the delicious smell of spices pervaded the air torn by the cries of the dying. Unrecognizable Cossacks, more terrifying than ever in wigs and dresses, marauded through the fragrant spicy streets, knee deep in a marsh of mud-congealed cadavers, reeking of blood, wielding dripping swords and pursing naked unfortunates as horses whinnied and galloped, dogs barked and children screamed.
The heat
Of carnage, like Nile’s sun-sodden slime,
Engendered monstrous shapes of every crime.
The bodies themselves were piled so high that Langeron found it impossible not to walk on them. Richelieu, still holding the hand of his child, met Damas, and the two had to clear bodies to let the little girl walk along. The massacre continued until four in the afternoon, when the Turks finally surrendered.
The glow
Of burning streets, like moonlight on the water,
Was imaged back in blood, the sea of slaughter.
Ismail’s surviving senior Pasha laid out some carpets on the ground in the middle of the ruined fortress, surrounded by the bodies of his massacred compatriots, and smoked a pipe as tranquilly as if he was still sitting in his seraglio. Thus was conquered ‘one of the keys of the Ottoman Empire’.21 Almost 40,000 died22 in one of the greatest military massacres of the century.
On a scrap of paper, now yellowed and almost smelling of gunpowder, Suvorov told Potemkin: ‘Nations and walls fell before the throne of Her Imperial Majesty. The assault was murderous and long. Ismail is taken on which I congratulate Your Highness.’23
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The Prince was ‘as happy, as affectionate as a Sultan’.24 He ordered the guns to be fired to celebrate and at once wrote to Catherine, sending the new favourite’s brother, Valerian Zubov, whom he liked, with the news – which he recounted with all due credit to Suvorov. ‘I congratulate you with my whole heart,’25 Catherine replied. The hostile Langeron claimed that the man who had not wanted to lose ten men a month earlier now boasted, ‘What are 10,000–12,000 men to the cost of such a conquest?’ Potemkin may have played the bloodthirsty conqueror, but it is more revealing that he never visited Ismail, despite planning to do so daily: he fell ill, as he often did after the suspense was over, but he also had no wish to parade through the ‘hideous spectacle’.26 He finally sent Popov instead. He was certainly delighted with his victory, but he was also profoundly upset about Russian casualties – he lost his great-nephew Colonel Alexander Raevsky, one of two brothers who were ‘dearest of all his nephews’.*1 His attitude was more likely to have been that it was a dirty job well done. He was relieved it had fallen because he and Catherine hoped this would jolt the Turks into a generous peace. Potemkin was also delighted to hear that, when the news reached Vienna, the Prince de Ligne had had to eat his weasel words about his generalship.27
It is said that, when Suvorov arrived in Jassy right after the battle, Potemkin received him splendidly and asked, ‘How I can reward you for your services?’ Suvorov snapped, ‘No, Your Highness, I’m not a merchant…No one can reward me but God and the Empress!’ This is fiction that has become history.*2 The two originals did not meet until February, and their notes to each other were jubilant. When both arrived almost simultaneously in Petersburg, Potemkin continued to praise and promote his favourite commander.28
Serenissimus moved the army into winter quarters and travelled over to his ‘capital’, Jassy. As the entourage approached, Richelieu noticed the light rising from the town, illuminated by torches of a fête in Potemkin’s honour. However, the Prince was reluctant to linger in Jassy.29
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Potemkin wanted to return to Petersburg with the prestige of a supreme commander who had won victories in a theatre of war ‘making almost a quarter of the globe, everywhere with success’. He may not have had the bloodcurdling, bayoneting dash of Suvorov but, as a strategist and overall military and naval commander, he had not lost a single battle. In a letter to Catherine, he could not resist comparing his victories to those of Prince Eugene of Savoy and Frederick the Great, yet he claimed he was avoiding the sin of pride, after her ‘maternal advice in the last campaign’. He looked back at his life and thanked Catherine for her favour, ‘which you showed to me from my first youth’. He concluded: ‘Since I belong to you, all my wonderful successes belong to you too.’
Catherine and Potemkin were not old, but they were no longer young. They lived on their nerves and the years of power had made them more imperious and more sensitive. Yet they still cared for one another, gently and lovingly. The siege of Ismail had taken a toll on both of them. The partners exchanged news of their illnesses. ‘My health is improving,’ Catherine wrote, ‘I think it’s gout which has reached my stomach and bowels but I cure it with pepper and a glass of malaga wine which I drink daily.’ He was ill in Jassy but, when he heard about her illness, he agreed with her malaga wine and pepper, but added that she must ‘always keep your stomach warm. I kiss your hands, foster-mother.’30 He had been away from Petersburg for almost two years and asked Catherine if he could come home. ‘It’s extremely necessary for me to be with you for a short time,’ he wrote from Jassy on 11 January 1791. Poland was probably the main subject he wanted to discuss with her in person. ‘Let me have a look at you.’31
She wanted to see him – ‘talking’s better than writing’, she agreed – but she asked him to wait a little. This has been interpreted as the beginning of his fall from grace and her apprehension that he would return to Petersburg to try to remove Zubov. But her letters do not read like that, though there were certainly tensions between them. He was frustrated at her rigidity towards appeasing Prussia. He also knew that, in the capital, the Prussians, the Poles and their friends, the Grand Duke Paul and various Masonic Lodges, were trying to undermine him, claiming he wanted to be king of Poland. He suspected Zubov too was plotting against him. But he remained confident of his eternal ‘sacred’ ties with the Empress: ‘I don’t doubt your permanent favour.’32
Catherine certainly did not act as if she was losing the fondness of a lifetime. On the contrary, she showered him with gifts and even bought the Taurida Palace again – for 460,000 roubles – to pay his debts. But an amused Potemkin noticed that the diamonds on the Order of St Andrew, sent by the Empress, were fakes, made of crystal – surely a symbol of an increasingly sclerotic Court.33 She simply asked him to wait a few weeks in the south so as not to miss the chance of making peace with the Turks after the triumph of Ismail. Its fall had indeed shattered Istanbul.34
If a peace could be negotiated with the Porte, Russia could afford to turn to the problem of Poland: its Four-Year Sejm was drafting a constitution that it hoped would make it a strong and viable kingdom and therefore a threat to Russia. Potemkin, who dominated Russia’s policies towards both Poland and the Porte, proposed to Catherine that they force the Turks to cede Moldavia to Poland and thus turn the Poles against the Prussians.35 But it all depended on the Turks. Now Britain and Prussia threw them a lifeline – the ‘Ochakov Crisis’.
Even before the fall of Ismail, the Triple Alliance had been planning to foil Russian aggrandizement. Until now, Prussia had driven the coalition against Russia and it was mainly due to Frederick William’s inept, inconsistent diplomacy that more damage had not been done. Now Britain, freed from the Nootka Sound Crisis with Spain, to
ok the lead against Russia for both commercial and political reasons. The worsening of relations between Britain and Russia had begun with Catherine’s Armed Neutrality, and the ending of the Anglo-Russian commercial treaty in 1786, followed by the signing of a Franco-Russian one the next year. This led to a feeling that Britain was too dependent on Russian naval supplies and should instead trade more with Poland. Britain was alarmed by Russia’s ascendancy over eastern Europe, especially after the fall of Ismail promised a victorious peace with the Turks. William Pitt, the Prime Minister, therefore aimed to create ‘a federative system’ of alliances with Poland and Prussia, among others, to force Russia to accept a peace based on the status quo ante bellum. If Russia did not agree to give up Ochakov and other gains, it would be attacked by the Royal Navy at sea and Prussia on land. It certainly looked as if Britain was going to war merely to ‘pluck a feather from the cap of the Empress’.36
Selim III was unlikely to make peace with Russia when Britain was arming a fleet to bombard Petersburg. The Sultan executed his latest Grand Vizier, reappointed the hawkish Yusuf-Pasha and gathered another army. Pitt and the Prussians prepared their ultimatum, their armies and their warships. The Prince was needed in Petersburg: now he could go home.
On 10 February 1791, he set out from Jassy. It was said that he joked that he was going to Petersburg to remove Zubov and ‘extract the tooth’ – zub meaning tooth – though, in the midst of the Ochakov Crisis, he had more important matters to discuss. Petersburg waited his arrival with greater apprehension than ever. ‘All the ministers are seized with panic,’ fearing the Prince, wrote the Swedish envoy Count Curt Stedingk to King Gustavus III on 8 February.37 ‘Everyone is in agitation’ at the prospect of the ‘apparition of this phenomenon’. Government stopped: ‘No one dares, and no one can, decide anything before the arrival.’38
Catherine the Great & Potemkin Page 70