‘Madame,’ Stedingk asked the Empress at Court, ‘should one believe the gossip that Prince Potemkin will bring peace?’
‘I know nothing of it but it’s possible,’ replied Catherine, adding that Serenissimus was original and very clever and he would do everything he could and that she let him. Then she mused revealingly: ‘He loves to prepare me surprises.’
The Court carriages were sent to await his arrival, the roads illuminated with torches nightly for a week. Count Bruce led the welcoming delegation, waiting in a hut by the roadside from Moscow, not even daring to undress. Bezborodko rode out to prearrange tactics with Potemkin.39 Frederick William gathered 88,000 men in East Prussia, Lord Hood amassed an ‘armament’ of thirty-six ships-of-the-line and twenty-nine smaller vessels at Spithead – and the Prince of Taurida, trailing a dazzling new mistress, prepared for war and for the most extravagant ball in the history of Russia.40
Skip Notes
*1 The surviving brother, Nikolai Raevsky, was the heroic general of 1812 who held the Raevsky Redoubt at the Battle of Borodino. Much later, he befriended Pushkin, who travelled with him, enjoying his stories of Potemkin and 1812. The Raevskys were the sons of Samoilov’s sister.
*1 Virtually every history, Russian or English, contains this piece of Suvorov legend. This was supposedly the end of their relationship, in which the jealous Potemkin got his comeuppance from the genius Suvorov. In fact, this encounter probably never happened. No witness in Jassy, such as Langeron, mentions it. Potemkin was in Bender not Jassy after Ismail. Recent research by V. S. Lopatin, who has completely disproved most of the accepted pillars of the Potemkin–Suvorov relationship, shows that the two could not have met for two months – that is, not until the first week in February.
PART EIGHT
The Last Dance
1791
31
THE BEAUTIFUL GREEK
First, test yourself to see if you are a coward; if you aren’t, fortify your innate bravery by spending much time with your enemies.
Prince Potemkin’s advice to his great-nephew N. N. Raevsky, the future hero of 1812 and friend of A. S. Pushkin
When Potemkin swept into Petersburg on 28 February 1791 – his way emblazoned with hundreds of torches1 – the Empress hurried to meet him. She presented him with the Taurida Palace once again – she had only just bought it from him. The Anglo-Prussian coalition’s threat of war was Russia’s gravest crisis since the days of Pugachev and the two old partners met anxiously every day, while the nobility and diplomats outdid each other to celebrate Serenissimus’ return.
‘In spite of the great expectation I had had of this event, and all I had heard of the importance and power of this man, the train, the fracas, the excitement, that accompanied him, amazed me, and I still have its effects before my eyes,’ wrote Jean-Jacob Jennings, a Swedish diplomat. ‘Since this Prince arrived, there is no other subject of conversation in all society, in all high houses or lower, than of him – what he does or will do, whether he dines or will dine or has dined. The interest…of the public is on him alone – all the tributes, respects, offerings of all classes of citizens – lords, artisans, merchants, writers – all sit at his door and fill his anterooms.’2
The Prince of Taurida appeared all-conquering: ‘His credit and authority have never been greater,’ noticed the Swedish envoy Stedingk. ‘All that shone before his arrival is eclipsed and all Russia is at his feet.’3 There was an outpouring of admiration – and envy from some of the magnates.4 The Russian ‘public’, so far as it existed, meaning the lower nobility and the merchants, hero-worshipped him. Ladies wore his picture on medallions – ‘Her pearl-like bosom heaving sighs,’ wrote Derzhavin, ‘A hero’s image animates.’5 The specially written ‘Ode to Potemkin’ was recited at receptions.6 Every grandee had to give a ball in what was called ‘The Carnival of Prince Potemkin’.7
Catherine herself seemed relieved and delighted to see Serenissimus after so long. ‘Victory has embellished him,’ she told Grimm. Potemkin was now ‘handsome as the day, gay as a lark, brilliant as a star, more spiritual than ever, no longer biting his nails, giving parties every day. Everyone is enchanted, despite the envious.’8 The Prince had never been more charming. Even Augustyn Deboli, the hostile envoy of Revolutionary Poland, reported that Potemkin was so polite that he mischievously asked everyone if they noticed how his behaviour was altered.9
This is how Potemkin appeared at his apogee in March 1791. ‘I saw for the first time this extraordinary man last Sunday in the circle of the Grand Duke,’ gushed Jennings. ‘He had been described as very ugly. I did not find him so. On the contrary, he has an imposing presence and that eye defect does not influence his face as badly as you would expect.’ Potemkin wore the white uniform of the Grand Admiral of the Black Sea Fleet, covered in diamonds and medals. As soon as this Grand Admiral appeared, the ‘circle around the Grand Duke disappeared and it formed around Prince Potemkin exactly as if we saw in him the person of our Master’. Even princes of Württemberg stood upright and immobile ‘like statues, eyes fixed on the great man, waiting for him to deign to gratify them with a look’.10
‘The Potemkin Carnival’ meant a fête every night. The courtiers – Nikolai Saltykov, Zavadovsky, Ivan Chernyshev, Bezborodko, Osterman, Stroganov and Bruce – competed to hold the most extravagant ball. Some almost ruined themselves, trying to keep up with the Stroganovs. But they were confused about the identity of the Prince’s latest mistress. The courtiers prepared to give balls in honour of his ‘sultana’, Princess Dolgorukaya, until they noticed that he never visited her. She claimed to be ill – yet he still did not visit, not even once, at which point the cowardly courtiers cancelled their balls and the crestfallen Princess had to retire to Moscow.11 On 18 March, the Prince de Nassau-Siegen gave one of the most expensive parties, with plates piled with sturgeon and sterlet, Potemkin’s favourite delicacy. There, Serenissimus, wearing his superb jewel-encrusted grand hetman’s uniform that Deboli claimed cost 900,000 roubles,12 unveiled his other favourite dish: Madame de Witte, the most intriguing adventuress of all.
* * *
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The appearance at Nassau’s ball of ‘this beauty of renown’ was ‘the greatest sensation’, according to a goggle-eyed Jennings. When Potemkin had finished his card game, he rushed over to her and talked only to her, while everyone else stared: ‘all the women were agitated, men too – the former with despair, irritation and a lot of curiosity, the latter with desire and expectation’.13
Sophie de Witte, now twenty-five years old, with blonde curls, a noble Grecian face and violet eyes, was ‘the prettiest woman in Europe in that era’. She rose from teenage courtesan in Constantinople to one of the richest countesses of Poland: for forty years, she astonished and scandalized Europe with her ‘beauty, vice and crimes’. Born in a Greek village on the outskirts of ‘the city of the world’s desire’, she was nicknamed the ‘Beautiful Greek’ or ‘La Belle Phanariote’ after the Greek Phanar district. Her mother, who traded vegetables, sold her at twelve to the Polish Ambassador, who procured girls for King Stanislas-Augustus, while her equally fine sister was sold to a senior Ottoman pasha. From then on, every time she was bought, another man fell in love with her and outbid the first. So, on her way with the ambassadorial baggage, Sophie de Tchelitche, as she then called herself, was spotted by Major de Witte, son of the Governor of the Polish fortress of Kamenets-Podolsk, who bought her for 1,000 ducats and married her in 1779 aged fourteen. Witte sent her off to Paris with Princess Nassau-Siegen to learn manners – and French.
La Belle Phanariote bewitched Paris. Langeron saw her there and praised ‘the tenderest and most beautiful eyes that nature had ever formed’, but he was under no illusion about her cunning manipulations and the ‘coldness of her heart.’14 Some of her fascination was ‘a sort of originality proceeding from either feigned naivety or ignorance’. In Paris, everyone prais
ed her ‘beaux yeux’. When someone asked about her health, she replied, ‘My beaux yeux are sore,’ which amused everyone enormously.15 Back in Poland, when Potemkin’s War began, her husband, now himself governor of Kamenets, was the linchpin of the Prince’s espionage network in southern Poland: it was he who smuggled spies into Khotin hidden with the butter. But it was probably his wife who provided the information: her sister was married to the Pasha of Khotin, while Sophie herself became the mistress of the besieging general, Nikolai Saltykov.16 But the sharp-eyed Ribas spotted her and introduced her to Potemkin at Ochakov. Visitors to Jassy and Bender noticed her Greek costume and how she posed melodramatically and ‘flung herself around’, to impress Serenissimus. She became the confidante of his affair with Dolgorukaya, whom she then supplanted.17 Potemkin appointed the complaisant husband to be governor of Kherson.18 It is likely he used her as a secret agent among the Poles and Turks.19
The Empress, used to her consort’s latest paramours, gave the ‘Beautiful Greek’ a pair of diamond earrings.20 This made Sophie’s husband so proud that he boasted she would be remembered in history as the friend of royalty, adding: ‘The Prince is not the lover of my wife but just a friend because, if he was her lover, I would break any connection with him.’ This simple-minded wishful thinking must have provoked some sniggers. The courtesan–spy clearly fascinated Potemkin – she was an Oriental, an intriguer, a Venus and a Greek, any of which would have attracted him. ‘You’re the only woman’, Potemkin told her, ‘who surprises me’ to which the minx replied, ‘I know. If I’d been your mistress, you’d already have forgotten me. I am only your friend and always will be.’ (Ladies are always bound to say this in public: no one close to them believed her.)21 Perhaps she broke her own rule, because two weeks later diplomats noticed Potemkin suddenly began to lose interest: had she succumbed against her better judgement?22
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Serenissimus decided to hold a ball to defy the Anglo-Prussian coalition and celebrate Ismail. He was supposed to be negotiating the subsidy that Russia would pay Gustavus III for a Russo-Swedish alliance. It was in Potemkin’s interest to play this out because Britain was also offering Sweden a subsidy for the use of its ports in a war against Russia. The threat was serious enough for Potemkin to send Suvorov on 25 April to command the corps facing Sweden as a living warning to Gustavus. The Swedish King was trying to auction his services and Britain offered £200,000, but, once the Ochakov Crisis was over, the price would drop. So Potemkin deliberately delayed negotiations by forcing the Swedish envoy, Stedingk, to sit through the rehearsals for his ball at the Taurida Palace.
Thus Stedingk received a theatrical education – but no diplomatic satisfaction at all.23 Serenissimus, covered in diamonds, seemed preoccupied by diamonds – he looked at diamonds, admired the huge diamonds on his miniature portrait of Catherine, played with diamonds until the stones alone became the subject of conversation.24 Potemkin made Stedingk ‘walk through fifty apartments, see and admire everything [then] got me into his carriage, talking only of himself, the Crimea & the Black Sea Fleet.’ Next, there were more rehearsals.25 When the Prince got bored with his own spectaculars, his face revealed ‘disgust boredom lassitude…that came from having all desires satisfied, when one is blasé about everything and there is nothing left to want’.26
Then he gave an order: ‘200 musicians, placed in the gallery of the great hall, play…with the two of us as their only audience. The Prince is in Seventh Heaven. 100 people arrive, they dance, they do another quadrille.’ The rehearsals started at 3 p.m. and ended at 9 p.m. ‘without one moment to fix the attention of the Prince on Sweden. Such Sire’, Stedingk sorrowfully told his King, ‘is the man who governs the Empire.’27 Potemkin told everyone who would listen that he was not involved in foreign affairs but thought only about his entertainment.28
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The real business was conducted in Catherine’s apartments, where the partners struggled to counter an imminent Anglo-Prussian war. After two years apart, they were adapting their relationship to his overbearing dominance and her weary obstinacy. On 16/27 March, Pitt sent off his ultimatum to Petersburg, via Berlin. It was a rash act for the usually cautious British Prime Minister, but thirty-nine ships-of-the-line and 88,000 Prussians were no idle threat. The Empress was determined that there would be no concessions to the Prussians and the English.
In their struggle to find a way out of the trap, Potemkin and Catherine even turned to the leading statesman of the hated French Revolution, Honoré Gabriel Riqueti, Comte de Mirabeau. Potemkin thought ‘France has gone mad,’ and Catherine believed Mirabeau should be hanged, not from just one gallows, but many – and then ‘broken on the wheel’. But it was fitting that Potemkin should be in secret contact with Mirabeau, who was his only European equal in terms of eccentric brilliance, physical scale and extravagant debauchery. (Ironically Mirabeau’s father once muttered about his son: ‘I know of nobody but the Empress of Russia for whom this man would make a suitable match.’) The Prince paid fat bribes to ‘Mirabobtcha’, as he nicknamed him, in an attempt to persuade France to join Russia against Britain (while in fact Mirabeau advocated entente with London). Mirabeau, already bribed generously by the beleaguered Louis XVI, simply ‘consumed’ Potemkin’s money to pay for his magnificent lifestyle and then fell ill. He died in Paris on 19 March/2 April 1791 – the day after Nassau’s ball for Potemkin.29
Serenissimus knew that Russia simply could not fight the Triple Alliance and Poland as well as the Turks. So while he prepared the army for a broader war, placing corps on the Dvina and Kiev ready to advance across Poland into Prussia, he was prepared to buy off Frederick William to give Russia a free hand with the Turks and Poles. Catherine did not want to surrender to the coalition. This strained their friendship. Stedingk believed that ‘even Her Majesty the Empress’ was ‘secretly jealous’ of Serenissimus. Perhaps that was why Catherine said Potemkin did ‘everything she let him do’. Stedingk reported that ‘the Empress is no longer what she was…Age and infirmities have rendered her less capable.’ It was now easier to trick her, appeal to her vanity and mislead her. To paraphrase Lord Acton, absolute power coarsens, and both of them had become coarser – the destiny of statesmen who never leave government. Yet Potemkin proudly still treated her as a woman. ‘What do you want?’, he told the Swede. ‘She is a woman – one’s got to manage her. One can’t rush anything.’30
Actually, it was less personal than that. She was anxious because there was a real divergence in their views, something that had never happened before. She probably worried that he might win, and undermine her authority. Potemkin was irritated that her pride and obstinacy were threatening all their achievements. Would she surrender to Potemkin’s superior knowledge of the military situation?31
The Prince also wanted to remove the Empress’s companion, Platon Zubov, who was increasingly involved in intrigues against him. This must have added to the tension. A politician is never so exposed as when he appears invincible, for it unites his enemies, and Potemkin was beset by attempts to undermine him. Deboli recorded that Zubov, Saltykov and Nassau-Siegen were already intriguing against him, even though ‘so many attempts against…Potemkin failed like this one’.32 Yet Zubov was backed by his patron Nikolai Saltykov, Governor of the little Grand Dukes, and therefore connected to Paul, his pro-Prussian circle based at the Gatchina estate, and the Masonic Lodges, particularly the Rosicrucians, linked to Berlin.*1 Some of these Lodges33 became rallying-points for criticism of the Catherine–Potemkin regime, especially since so many magnates were Masons – and the Prince was not.34 Paul himself, who so hated Potemkin, was in treasonable correspondence with Berlin.35
Catherine and Potemkin now had little time for nostalgic endearments: they locked horns in bouts of argument and reconciliation as they had done since they fell in love seventeen years earlier. Catherine’s belief all those years ago that their arguments were ‘a
lways about power, not love’ was true enough now. When persuasion failed, Potemkin tried to bully her into changing her policy. Catherine resisted tearfully, though her tears were always as manipulative as his tantrums. Her refusal to make friendly noises towards a power that was about to invade an exhausted Russia was surely foolish. Potemkin, who knew the situation on the ground, was not suggesting surrender, merely sensible lulling of Frederick William until they had made peace with the Turks.
Potemkin told Catherine’s valet, Zakhar Zotov, that there would have to be a row because of the Empress’s postponing of the decision. She would not even correspond with Frederick William. Then Serenissimus muttered angrily about Zubov – why did Mamonov leave his place in such a silly way and not wait for Potemkin for arrange things? If the war became absolutely imminent, Potemkin would protect his Turkish gains and satisfy Prussia with a Polish partition. But partition, which would ruin his subtler plans for Poland, was a last resort.36
Catherine and Potemkin argued for days on end. Catherine wept. Potemkin raged. He bit his nails while the tumult hit Catherine in the bowels. By 22 March, Catherine was ill in bed with ‘spasms and strong colic’. Even when they rowed, they still behaved like an old husband and wife: Potemkin suggested she take medicine for her bowels but she insisted on relying ‘on nature’. The Prince kept up the pressure.37
Catherine the Great & Potemkin Page 71