Catherine the Great & Potemkin

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  ‘If you want to take the stone from my heart, if you want to calm the spasms,’ Catherine told Potemkin in early May, ‘then send couriers to the armies quickly and let land and sea forces start operations…’ – otherwise they would never get the peace both wanted.13 The Prince, in one of his moods of euphoric creativity, fired off orders to his forces while founding new settlements across the south. On 11 May, he ordered Admiral Ushakov to put to sea and pursue the enemy; Repnin, commanding the main army in his absence, to strike decisively across the Danube to destroy any concentration of Turkish forces; and Gudovich, commanding the Kuban corps, to take the strongest Ottoman fortress in those parts – Anapa.14 Meanwhile the partners worked out their Polish plans.

  On 16 May, when the Anglo-Prussian crisis was still unsettled. Catherine signed her first rescript to Potemkin on Poland. The Prince could intervene only if the Prussians moved into Poland, in which case Potemkin could offer the Poles the Ottoman principality of Moldavia in return for reversing their Revolution. If they did not take this bait, Potemkin could resort to ‘extreme measures’ in the traditional way, by arranging a confederation under his Polish allies, Branicki and Potocki. Catherine specifically added that among the ‘extreme measures’ she approved ‘your secret plan’ of raising the Orthodox in Kiev, Podolia and Bratslav, under the banner of the ‘Grand Hetman’ of the Cossacks.15 It is usually claimed that Potemkin did not receive the powers he wanted.16 On the contrary, his powers were potentially vast, though conditional on the real if diminishing likelihood of Prussia and England attacking Russia. (Negotiations with Fawkener had not yet started.)*4 Besides, Potemkin did not ‘receive’ the rescripts like a schoolboy from a headmistress: the couple worked on them together, correcting one another’s drafts, as they always had. The rescripts and correspondence show that Catherine agreed with Potemkin’s Cossack and Moldavian schemes, and had done so for more than two years.

  Potemkin’s Polish schemes are the mystery of his last year: he was weaving a tapestry of overlapping threads that no one has ever managed to untwine. His plans appear protean, shifting and exotic, but the Prince never saw the need to decide on a plan until the last moment. Meanwhile, he would run all of them simultaneously. He had been contemplating the Polish question since he came to power and his Polish policies existed on many different levels, but it is impossible to divorce them from his need for a principality outside Russian borders. All these plans contain slots for Potemkin’s own realm. He had convinced himself that his ‘independent’ Polish duchy, built around his Smila estates, would be a camouflaged means for Russia to win swathes of central Europe without having to repay the other powers with a second partition of Poland.

  There were four Potemkinian projects. There was annexation of Moldavia by Poland. This duchy would have fitted well into the Poland envisaged by his ally, Felix Potocki, in a letter to Potemkin that May: a federal republic of semi-independent hetmanates. Simultaneously, there was the plan for a confederation, led by Branicki and Potocki, that would overthrow the new Constitution and replace it with the old version or a new federal one with Moldavia as a bribe. Even as early as February, Potemkin had been flattering Potocki, inviting him to a meeting ‘on the veritable well-being of our common country’.17

  Then there was Potemkin’s idea of invading Poland as grand hetman of the Black Sea Cossacks to liberate the Orthodox of eastern Poland. This combined his Polish ancestry, his regal ambitions, his enjoyment of drama, his Russian instinct to break the Polish Revolution – and his ‘passion for Cossacks’.18 Even before procuring the Hetmanate, Potemkin had envisaged a special Polish role for Black Sea Cossacks, recruiting them in Poland.19 On 6 July 1787, for example, Catherine let him establish four such squadrons from his own Polish villages,20 where he already had his own forces: Smila’s mounted and infantry militia.21 Later, Alexandra Branicka explained that he ‘wanted to unite the Cossacks with the Polish army and declare himself king of Poland’.22

  This now seems the most unlikely of his plans but actually it was feasible. The Orthodox provinces of Podolia and eastern Poland, led by magnates like Felix Potocki and his old-fashioned vision of Polish freedom, were a long way from the sophisticated, Catholic Patriots who dominated the Four-Year Sejm in Warsaw with their new-fangled French concept of liberty (and who hated Potemkin). The mistake is to see this Cossack eruption in isolation: both Catherine and Potemkin clearly saw it as a way to mobilize the Orthodox population to break the power of the Revolution in Warsaw while possibly getting Serenissimus his own realm within a federated Poland, dominated by Russia.

  The fourth possibility was the second partition of Poland: Potemkin was never shy about discussing a new partition and often dangled it in front of Prussian envoys; despite the views of nationalistic Polish historians, however, it was his last option. He might have made Poland cede Thorn and Danzig in April to avoid war on two more fronts in April, but that moment had passed. This proudly reborn scion of the szlachta understood that partition destroyed his ancient homeland – ‘our country’ – and it also scuppered his personal base outside Russia. Strategically, it benefited Prussia more than any other state, bringing the Hohenzollerns nearer to Russia. He favoured the Petrine policy of keeping an independent Poland as a crippled and eccentric bufferzone. Far from wanting partition, most of Potemkin’s plans, such as the Moldavian option, involved enlarging Poland, not diminishing her. If he had lived longer, he might have succeeded and helped prevent partition. If Catherine had predeceased him, it is likely he would have moved to become a Polish magnate.

  Potemkin stayed in Petersburg to hammer out a Polish policy, while the stories of his sinister plans circulated in febrile revolutionary Warsaw. The Polish envoy Deboli stepped up the tension by sending Stanislas-Augustus every rumour of Potemkin’s royal ambitions. As his enemies united at Court to depose him at last, the scene was set for the bitterest crisis of his long friendship with Catherine.

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  ‘We were running things all right without you, weren’t we?’, Catherine replied to Potemkin, according to the hostile Deboli. The words ring true, though the tone is that of a wife wryly scolding her husband, not divorcing him.23 William Fawkener, Pitt’s special envoy, had arrived on 14 May, but the protracted negotiations to settle the Ochakov Crisis only really started in early June, when Catherine and Potemkin held long conversations with him. In his unpublished despatches, Fawkener observed their different styles but united message: during one audience with the Englishman, Catherine was just praising Potemkin’s surprisingly good mood when she was interrupted by one of her greyhounds barking outside at a child. She reassured the little boy and, turning pointedly to Fawkener, added: ‘Dogs that bark don’t always bite.’24

  Potemkin, on the other hand, invited the cowed British bulldog to dinner, where the Englishman was utterly overwhelmed by the Prince’s ebullient and entertaining soliloquy – ‘strange and full of inconsistency’. Serenissimus ‘told me he was Russian and loved his country but he loved England too; that I was an islander and consequently selfish and loved my island only’. He made a Potemkinian offer: why did not Britain have Crete (Candia) in the Mediterranean as its prize from the Ottoman bonanza? This pied-à-terre would give Britain control of Egyptian–Levantine trade. And then he went into raptures about his southern lands, the soil, the people, the fleet – ‘great projects’ whose success depended ‘solely on him’. At the end of this performance, the bewildered Fawkener admitted to London that he had not had an opportunity of getting a single word in edgeways, but it left Pitt in no doubt about the seriousness of Russia’s commitment to the Black Sea and its refusal to compromise over Ochakov.25 By early July, England and Prussia realized they would simply have to buckle to Catherine’s demands.

  Fawkener was further humiliated by the arrival in Petersburg of Robert Adair, sent mischievously (and possibly treasonably) by Charles James Fox as the opposition’s unofficial envoy. Simon Vorontsov
ensured Adair, aged twenty-eight, a good reception by telling Potemkin that even Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, the queen of the ton, ‘honours him with her friendship’.26 Adair received a ‘great welcome’ from Empress and Prince. Before he left, Potemkin gave him a present in Catherine’s name – a ring with her portrait.27

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  The Prince, at the height of his dignity, now resembled a noble bear baited by a pack of dogs. Zubov played on Catherine’s almost subliminal unease about Potemkin’s domineering behaviour by implying that he was becoming a possible threat to her. ‘Some secret suspicion hid in the Empress’s heart against this Field-Marshal,’28 recalled Gavrili Romanovich Derzhavin, the neo-Classical poet and civil servant. Serenissimus muttered that she was surrounded by his enemies. When Catherine was at Tsarskoe Selo for the summer, Potemkin paid fewer visits than usual and did not stay long. As an agreement with the Anglo-Prussians got closer and the Polish Question more urgent, ambassadors noticed that Catherine seemed to treat him coolly. As so often before, this coolness gave hope to Potemkin’s enemies.

  Zubov was not just undermining the Prince with Catherine: first he managed to turn Suvorov29 against his former patron by offering favours that Potemkin had already recommended. So Suvorov fell out with Potemkin not because of the latter’s jealousy but due to the former’s misguided intriguing. Then Zubov told Derzhavin ‘in the Empress’s name’ not to go to Potemkin for favours: Zubov would provide whatever he wanted.

  Derzhavin had made his name with an ‘Ode to Princess Felitsa’, which teasingly described the Procurator-General Viazemsky as ‘choleric’ and Potemkin as ‘indolent’, yet the Prince protected him against Viazemsky and other enemies over the years.30 Derzhavin repaid Potemkin’s decency with petty betrayal – and poignant poetry. (His masterpiece, The Waterfall, which inspired Pushkin, was a posthumous tribute to Potemkin.)31 Zubov offered Derzhavin the post of secretary to the Empress. The poet accepted the job and moderated praise of Potemkin in his poems.

  When he delivered one of these. Potemkin stormed out of his bedroom, ordered his carriage and rode off ‘God knows where’ into a tempest of thunder and lightning outside. Derzhavin called meekly a few days later and Potemkin, who would have known exactly how Zubov had turned his protégé, received the poet coolly but without rancour.32

  The Prince always behaved manically at times of political tension. He chewed his nails and pursued love affairs with priapic enthusiasm. Derzhavin and foreigners like Deboli claimed he had gone mad – hinting that he suffered from the insanity of tertiary syphilis, for which there is no evidence. One night, Deboli claimed, Potemkin turned up drunk at a Countess Pushkina’s house and caressed her hair. She threatened to throw him out and he drawled that he had not given up the idea of being king of Poland.33 This is an unlikely story. Besides even his enemies admitted that his seductions had never been more successful. ‘Women crave the attentions of Prince Potemkin’, observed his critic, Count Fyodor Rostopchin, ‘like men crave medals.’34 Serenissimus gave a three-day fête in one of his houses near Tsarskoe Selo while ‘the town talk is engrossed’, Fawkener reported breathlessly to London, ‘by his quarrel with one woman, his apparent inclination for another, [and] his real attachment to a third’.35

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  The trap seemed to be closing on Potemkin. Most histories claim that, when the Prince finally left St Petersburg in late July, he had been ruined by Zubov, rejected by Catherine and defeated by his enemies, and was dying from a broken heart. This could hardly be further from the truth.

  In July when the Count was at Peterhof, Zubov thought he had planted enough suspicion in Catherine’s mind for his creeping coup to achieve its goal.36 But who was to replace Potemkin? There was no one else of his military or political stature – with one exception. On 24 June, Count Alexei Orlov-Chesmensky mysteriously arrived. His visits to the capital since 1774 always coincided with attempts to overthrow Potemkin: he liked to boast that, when he came in the door, Potemkin left by the window.37 But when Orlov-Chesmensky called at Tsarskoe Selo, Catherine let Potemkin know in a note – hardly the behaviour of a empress about to overthrow him.38 During June and July, Potemkin, in town, wrote to Catherine, in Tsarskoe Selo, about his agonizing hangnail. She was concerned enough to write back, signing her notes ‘Adieu Papa’. She enclosed the usual sycophantic letter from Zubov. Potemkin also sent her a dress as a present.39 Even Deboli reported that Catherine emphatically ordered Orlov-Chesmensky not to attack ‘her great friend’.40

  Furthermore Potemkin’s influence had not disappeared. When Fawkener finally suggested that England would agree to Russian terms, Potemkin simply accepted the deal himself, without even checking with Catherine. Deboli noted that this irritated Russian ministers – but it hardly suggests that he had lost his power.41 Then Potemkin delivered a series of victories: on 19 June, he announced that Kutuzov had followed his precise orders to strike at Badadag – and had defeated 20,000 Turks. On 22 June, Gudovich stormed the fortress of Anapa, where – as a bonus – he captured the Chechen hero, Sheikh Mansour who had sought refuge there.*5 ‘This is the key that has opened the door for the big blows,’ Potemkin declared to Catherine on 2 July. ‘You’ll be pleased to see how they will roar in Asia!’ That day, maybe to reconcile with Potemkin, the Empress, accompanied by two Zubovs, came into Petersburg from Peterhof to dine with the Prince at the Taurida Palace, where she toasted her consort. So much for the imminent fall of Potemkin.42

  On 11 July, the Ochakov Crisis ended: the British and Prussians signed the compromise that allowed Catherine to keep Ochakov and the land between the Bug and Dniester – provided that the Turks made peace immediately. If they did not, Russia was free to fight for better terms. That very day, a courier arrived to announce that Repnin, following Potemkin’s order to strike across the Danube at enemy concentrations, had won a splendid victory at Manchin on 28 June, destroying the Grand Vizier’s army of 80,000 and preventing the two Turkish armies from combining. ‘Thank you for the good news, my friend,’ Catherine wrote to Potemkin. ‘Two holidays in one, my friend, and other wonderful events besides. I’ll come to the city to celebrate tomorrow.’ The ‘Te Deums’ were sung before the Empress at the Kazan Cathedral. Catherine threw dinners and balls, attended by the Prince, for Fawkener.43

  Warsaw and Petersburg now awaited Potemkin’s reaction to the May the Third Constitution. The Prince, like a giant if rusty howitzer, was turning slowly towards Poland, but what were his plans? Intrigues and plans swirled around him. Deboli was convinced that Potemkin planned to be king of Poland by creating a ‘civil war’, meaning either the Confederation or the Cossack invasion.44 Branicki in Warsaw swaggered from planning his Confederation to patriotic suggestions to increase the size of Poland. Alexandra Branicka wanted Potemkin to be Stanislas-Augustus’ heir.45 Warsaw had been awash for years with pamphlets warning that Potemkin would make Alexandra’s children heirs to the throne.46 There were comical interludes amid the menace. The Prince could not resist teasing the Polish envoy, Deboli, at a party, saying that the Poles liked the Sublime Porte so much they even wore Turkish pantaloons. Deboli was offended by this trouser insult, ‘so I responded that we did not need other people’s pantaloons because we had our own’.47

  Potemkin was torn. His duty was to gallop south and negotiate peace with the Turks, but his instinct was to stay in Petersburg, where he remained exposed to Zubov, until he and Catherine had thrashed out what to do about Poland. This once again raised the tension between these two hypersensitive connoisseurs of power, who now became unhappy with each other, ruled by ‘little mutual jealousies’.48 Catherine wanted him to focus on the peace.

  When the row blew up, it was about women as well: was she still jealous of Potemkin even though she loved her Blackie or was she simply weary of his parade of debauchery? Potemkin suggested that the feckless Prince Mikhail Golitsyn be appointed one of the new army inspectors, crea
ted to wipe out abuses in the military. ‘He won’t bring credit upon you in the Army,’ replied Catherine, but she was most irritated about Golitsyn’s wife. Everyone in Petersburg now knew that Potemkin, bored of the Beautiful Greek, was infatuated by Princess Praskovia Andreevna Golitsyna (née Shuvalova), the literary but ‘restless’ girl who became the Prince’s ‘last passion’.49 Catherine told him: ‘Let me say that his wife’s face, however nice it may be, is not worth the cost of burdening yourself with such a man…his wife may be charming but there’s absolutely nothing to gain by courting her.’ Indeed Praskovia’s family were protecting her virtue, so Potemkin might well end up with the husband without even getting the wife. Catherine pulled no punches. Both Golitsyns were deceiving him. ‘My friend, I am used to telling you the truth. You should also tell it to me.’ She begged him to go south and ‘conclude peace and after that you’ll come back here and amuse yourself as much as you wish…As for this letter, do tear it to pieces after reading it.’50 But the Prince kept the most biting letter Catherine ever wrote to him.*6

  Her paroxysm of anger was, as so often, the letting-off of steam at the end of their argument. She had just signed her second secret rescript to Potemkin of 18 July that settled their debate and meant he could immediately leave for the south. Russian, Polish and Western historians have argued about its meaning for 200 years. Most of the confusion is caused by the problem of reconciling the extraordinary powers it granted Potemkin with the conviction that he was falling from power. The legend claims that the Prince was a broken man, haemorrhaging power, who ‘could not bear the thought of disgrace’ when ‘he learned that Platon Zubov seemed to have absolute power over the Empress’s mind’. This is what foreigners were told when they visited Petersburg in the Zubov ascendancy after Potemkin’s death.51 Since it has been accepted that Catherine and Zubov were about to remove him, how could she be giving him vast powers to make peace or war with Turks and Poles? Therefore, they argued, Catherine must have signed a sham just to get rid of him. This was based on hindsight, not on reality.52