Alexander Pushkin, who befriended Langeron in Odessa in 1824, agreed that Potemkin was ‘touched by the hand of history…We owe the Black sea to him.’34 Cities, ships, Cossacks, the Black Sea itself, and his correspondence with Catherine, remain his best memorials.
Derzhavin was moved to compose his epic The Waterfall soon after Potemkin’s death. It catches many sides of the Maecenas and Alcibiades that the poet knew. He uses the waterfall itself – its magnificence, speed, natural power – to symbolize Potemkin as well the turbulence of life and its transitory nature. Potemkin was one of imperial Russia’s most remarkable statesmen in a class only with Peter the Great and Catherine herself. The Duc de Richelieu, that fine judge of character and himself a statesman, was the foreigner who best understood Serenissimus. ‘The sum of his great qualities’, he wrote, ‘surpassed all his faults…Nearly all his public actions bear the imprint of nobility and grandeur.’35
The dust of Alcibiades! -
Do worms dare crawl about his head there?
Gavrili Derzhavin, The Waterfall
The Empress decided that the Prince’s funeral should be held in Jassy. Potemkin had asked Popov to bury him in his village of Chizhova, but Catherine believed he belonged in one of his cities,36 Kherson or Nikolaev.37 It was strange that she did not bury him in Petersburg, but perhaps that rationalist child of the Enlightenment did not ascribe great importance to graves. She was much more interested in the places and people they shared when he was alive. Besides, she knew that the further from the capital the body of Potemkin rested, the less Paul could degrade it after her death.
On 11 October, Potemkin’s body was placed in a hall, probably in the Ghika Palace, for his lying-in-state: the catafalque was enclosed in a chamber of black velvet, trimmed with silver tassels and held up by silver cords. The dais was decorated in rich gold brocade. He lay in an open coffin upholstered with pink velvet, covered by a canopy of rose and black velvet, supported by ten pillars and surmounted by ostrich feathers. Potemkin’s orders and batons were laid out on velvet cushions and on two pyramids of white satin which stood on either side of the coffin. His sword, hat and scarf lay on its lid. Nineteen huge candles flickered, six officers stood guard. Soldiers and Moldavians cried about ‘their lost protector’ and filed past the coffin. In front of this magnificent mise-en-scène was a black board inscribed with Potemkin’s titles and victories.*4
At 8 a.m. on 13 October, the Ekaterinoslav Grenadiers and Dnieper Musketeers lined the streets through which the procession was to pass. The cannons fired salutes and the bells rang dolefully as the coffin was borne out by generals, along with the canopy carried by Life-Guards. A squadron of Hussars and then Cuirassiers led the way. The horses were led by stablemen in rich liveries tied with black crêpe. Then 120 soldiers in long black mantles bore torches, thirty-six officers held candles. Next there were the exotic Turkish costumes of the boyars of Moldavia and the princes of the Caucasus. After the clergy, two generals carried the trappings of power. The miniature diamond-encrusted portrait of Catherine which he always wore was more telling than all the medals and batons.
The black hearse, bearing the coffin, harnessed to eight black-draped horses, led by postillions in long black cloaks and hats, clattered through the streets followed by the Prince’s nieces. His Cossacks brought up the rear.
The procession approached the rounded corner bastions of the Golia Monastery and passed through the fortified thirty-metre-high gate-tower. The coffin was carried into the Church of the Ascension, once visited by Peter the Great. The mixture of Byzantine, Classical and Russian architecture in its white pillars and spires was Potemkin’s own. Cannons fired a final salute.38
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The loss of Potemkin left a gap in Catherine’s life that could never be filled: after Christmas, she stayed in her room for three days without emerging. She talked about him often. She ordered the 101-gun salute for the Peace of Jassy and held the celebration dinner – but she tearfully and curtly waved away any toasts. ‘Her grief was as deep as it was before.’ On 30 January 1792, when Samoilov delivered the text of the treaty, she and Potemkin’s nephew wept alone.39 When she came back from Tsarskoe Selo that summer, she told everyone that she was going to live at Potemkin’s house, which she named the Taurida after him, and she stayed there frequently. She loved that palace and often walked alone in its gardens, as if she was looking for him.40 A year later, she wept copiously on his birthday and the anniversary of his death, crying alone in her room all day. She visited the Taurida Palace with her grandsons and Zubov in attendance. ‘Everything there used to be charming,’ she told Khrapovitsky, ‘but now something’s not quite right.’ In 1793, she kept returning to the Taurida: sometimes she arranged to stay there secretly after dinner. ‘No one’, wrote Khrapovitsky,41 ‘could replace Potemkin in her eyes,’ but she surrounded herself with Potemkin’s circle.
Popov, already one of her secretaries, now became the living embodiment of the Prince’s political legacy. Indeed, Popov had only to say that Potemkin would not have approved for Catherine to refuse even to contemplate a proposal. Such was the power of a dead man. When she came to the Taurida Palace, Popov fell to his knees and thanked her for deigning to live in the house of his ‘creator’. Samoilov became procurator-general on the death of Prince Viazemsky. Ribas founded Odessa at Hadjibey as ordered by Potemkin, but Richelieu, as governor-general of New Russia, made it into one of the most cosmopolitan ports of the world. In 1815, Richelieu became prime minister of France.
Two years after Potemkin’s death, the Prince de Ligne recalled him to Catherine as ‘my dear and inimitable, lovable and admirable’ friend. Ligne himself never recovered from not being given command of an army and even begged Metternich to let him take part in Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812 – an unworthy repayment of Catherine’s and Potemkin’s generosity. He survived to become the aged ornament of the Congress of Vienna and managed his final epigram before expiring at the age of seventy-nine: ‘Le Congrès’, he said, ‘ne marche pas; mais il danse’.42 The Comte de Ségur adapted to the French Revolution to become Napoleon’s grand master of ceremonies, advised the Emperor not to invade Russia in 1812, and then emerged as a peer under the Restoration. Nassau-Siegen tried to persuade Napoleon to let him attack British India but died in 1806 in Prussia.
Francisco de Miranda became ‘El Precursor’ to the Liberator of South America, after serving as a general in the French Revolutionary armies. In 1806, he landed on the Venezuelan coast with 200 volunteers, then had to withdraw again. But in 1811 Simon Bolivar persuaded him to return as commander-in-chief of the Venezuelan patriot army. An earthquake and military defeats made the indecisive Dictator negotiate with the Spanish. When he tried to flee, Bolivar arrested him and handed him over to the Spanish. That lover of liberty died in 1816 in a Spanish prison – thirty years after meeting Serenissimus. Sir James Harris was created Earl of Malmesbury, and Talleyrand called him the ‘shrewdest minister of his time’. Sir Samuel Bentham became inspector-general of Navy Works and was responsible for building the fleet that won Trafalgar. Jeremy Bentham actually built a Panopticon prison, backed by George III, but the experiment failed. He blamed this on the King.
John Paul Jones was commissioned by Washington and Jefferson to defeat the Algerian pirates of the Barbary Coast, but he died in Paris on 7/18 July 1792 aged just forty-five and was given a state funeral. He became revered as the founder of the US Navy. His grave was lost until 1905, when General Horace Porter discovered Jones well preserved in a lead coffin. In an example of necro-imperialism, President Theodore Roosevelt sent four cruisers to bring Jones home and on 6 January 1913, thousands of miles and 125 years after parting with Potemkin, he was reburied in a marble sarcophagus, based on Napoleon’s at Invalides, at the Naval Academy at Annapolis, where he now rests.43
Catherine saw Branicka as Potemkin’s emotional heir, granting her Potemkin’
s apartments in the imperial palaces so they could spend time together, but specifying that Sashenka should be served by different servants because the faces of Potemkin’s old retainers would break her heart.44 Catherine promoted Platon Zubov to many of Potemkin’s posts, but he proved himself direly inadequate for any position.45 Many missed Serenissimus when they contemplated the insolent mediocrity of the Zubovs – ‘the rabble of the Empire’.46
Catherine, encouraged by Potemkin, had almost certainly planned to disinherit the ‘unstable’ Grand Duke Paul and pass the Crown directly to her grandson Alexander. Without Potemkin, she probably did not have the will to do it.47 On 5 November 1796, Catherine II rose at the usual time. She withdrew into her privy closet where she was struck down by a massive stroke. So, like George II of England, she was taken ill at a moment that unites kings and commoners. After her valet and maid had broken open the door, they bore her into her bedchamber where Dr Rogerson bled her. She was too heavy to lift on to the bed, so they laid her on a mattress on the floor. Emissaries galloped out to Gatchina to inform Grand Duke Paul: when they arrived, he thought they had come to arrest him. He set off for Petersburg. Some time in the afternoon, it is said, he and Bezborodko destroyed documents that suggested passing over Catherine’s son. On 6 November, Catherine died at 9.45 p.m., still on the mattress on the floor.
Paul I reversed as many of the achievements of his mother’s reign as possible. He avenged himself on Potemkin by making the Taurida Palace into the Horse-Guards’ barracks and the Winter Garden their stables. Potemkin’s library was childishly ‘exiled’ to Kazan, a unique example of bibliographic vengeance. He ordered the renaming of Gregoripol. He brought back the Prussian paradomania of his father, treating Russia like a barracks, and did his best to destroy the tolerant ‘army of Potemkin’ that he so hated.48 His brand of despotic inconsistency united against him the same elements that had overthrown Peter III. So Paul’s haunting fear of assassination became self-fulfilling. (Platon Zubov was one of his assassins.) Though Potemkin’s Cossacks remained as pillars of the Romanov regime, Paul’s sons, Alexander I and Nicholas I, enforced the same Prussianized paradomania that remained the face of the monarchy for the rest of its history: the ‘knouto-Germanic Empire’ is what the anarchist Bakunin called it.49
Sophie de Witte married the richest ‘kinglet’ of Poland, Felix Potocki, whom she hooked in Jassy after Potemkin’s death. Sophie embarked on a passionately incestuous affair with her stepson Yuri Potocki, committing ‘all the crimes of Sodom and Gomorrah’. When Langeron visited her, she told him, ‘You know what I am and whence I come, eh bien, I cannot live with just 60,000 ducats of revenue.’ Four years after her old husband died in 1805, she threw out the son and built up a fortune while raising her children. Countess Potocka died ‘honoured and admired’ in 1822.50
Sashenka Branicka, on the other hand, retired to her estates and became so rich she could not count it. ‘I don’t know exactly,’ she said, ‘but I should have about twenty-eight million.’ She lived majestically and almost royally into a different era. The witness of Potemkin’s last breath became the ‘bearer of his glory’. She kept her lithe, slender figure and fresh complexion into middle age but always wore those long Catherinian dresses, held in at the waist with a single wide buckle. She created a shrine to Potemkin at her estate and was painted with his bust behind her. Alexander I visited her twice and appointed her grand mistress of the Court. Even twenty years after Catherine’s death, Wiegel was amazed to observe the grandest noblewomen kissing her hand as if she were a grand duchess, which she seemed to accept ‘without the slightest unease or embarrassment’. Swathes of the Polish and Russian aristocracy were descended from her children by the time she died aged eighty-four in 1838, when Victoria was Queen of England.51
Potemkin’s ‘angel’, Countess Skavronskaya, was liberated by the death of her melomaniac husband and married an Italian Knight of Malta, Count Giulio Litta, for love.52 Tatiana, the youngest niece, Mikhail Potemkin’s widow, married the much older Prince Nikolai Yusupov, the descendant of a Tartar khan named Yusuf and said to maintain a whole village of serf–whores. Princess Yusupova was unhappily married but, like her uncle, amassed jewels that included the earrings of Marie-Antoinette, the Polar Star diamond and the diadem of Napoleon’s sister, Caroline Murat, Queen of Naples. Felix Yusupov, who killed Rasputin in 1916, was proud of his connection to Serenissimus.53
Two great-nieces complement Potemkin’s life. Branicka’s daughter Elisabeth, known as Lise, married Prince Michael Vorontsov, the son of Potemkin’s enemy Simon, who brought him up in England as a dry, phlegmatic milord. He became viceroy of New Russia and the Caucasus like his wife’s great-uncle. Lise was said to have inherited the secret certificate of Potemkin’s marriage to Catherine and tossed it into the Black Sea – an appropriate home for it. ‘Milord’ Vorontsov found it impossible to control his flirtatious, exquisitely mannered Princess. She was already involved in a secret affair with one of her Raevsky cousins, when in 1823 she met Alexander Pushkin, who had been exiled to Odessa. Her Potemkin connection was surely part of the attraction to the poet: he knew Potemkin’s nieces and noted down the stories they told. He fell in love with Princess Vorontsova. The poet hinted in his poems that they made love on a Black Sea beach. She was believed to be the inspiration for the women in many of his poems, including Tatiana in Eugene Onegin. In his poem ‘The Talisman’ he wrote, ‘There where the waves spray, The feet of solitary reefs…A loving enchantress, Gave me her talisman.’ The gift was a ring engraved in Hebrew.
Vorontsov ended the affair by sending Pushkin away. The poet avenged this by writing doggerel that mocked Vorontsov and (probably) by fathering his daughter Sophie, born to Lise nine months after Pushkin’s departure. Thus the blood of Potemkin and Pushkin was fused. Pushkin was wearing her ‘talisman’ when, in 1837, he was killed in a duel.54
Skavronskaya’s daughter, also Ekaterina, became a European scandal. Known as the ‘Naked Angel’ because of her fondness for wearing veil-like, transparent dresses and ‘le Chat Blanc’ – the ‘White Pussycat’ – for her sensual avidity, she married the heroic general Prince Peter Bagration. Like her mother, who was Potemkin’s ‘angel’, her face had a seraphic sweetness, her skin was alabaster, her eyes were a startling blue and her hair was a cascade of golden locks. She became Metternich’s mistress in Dresden in 1802 and bore him a daughter, Clementine, who was thus related to both Potemkin and the ‘Coachman of Europe’. Goethe saw her at Carlsbad and raved about her as she began another affair with Prince Louis of Prussia. After Bagration’s death at the Battle of Borodino, she flaunted herself and dabbled in European politics at the Congress of Vienna in 1814. She competed ruthlessly with the Duchess of Sagan for the favours of Tsar Alexander I: each occupied different wings of the Palais Palm. The Austrian policemen who spied on her bedroom in Vienna reported on her superb ‘practical expertise’. The White Pussycat then moved to Paris, where she was famous for her promiscuity, fine carriage and Potemkin diamonds. In 1830, she married an English general and diplomat Lord Howden. Touchingly, when she visited the old Metternich thirty-five yeas later in his exile in Richmond, his daughter remembered that she could barely stop laughing because the old ‘Angel’ was still ludicrously wearing the see-through dresses that had once enraptured the princes of Europe. She lived until 1857, but her daughter Clementine, who was brought up by the Metternichs, died young.55
Finally, Sophia, Samoilov’s daughter, married Count Bobrinsky’s son, so that the blood of Catherine, the Orlovs and the Potemkins was also fused.56
The 1905 Revolution was heralded in Odessa by the mutiny of sailors of the Battleship Prince Potemkin of Taurida. This spawned Eisenstein’s film: the very name Potemkin, fostered by tsarist autocracy, thus became the symbol of Bolshevism.*5 The Richelieu Steps in Odessa were renamed the ‘Potemkin Steps,’ so the statue of the French Duke today looks down the steps named after the ‘extraordinary man’ he so admired.
And of course the phrase ‘Potemkin Village’ entered the language.
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Not all the body of Potemkin arrived in Kherson on 23 November 1791. When great men were embalmed their viscera were buried separately. The resting place of the heart was especially significant. Earlier that year, for example, the heart of Mirabeau had been carried through the streets of Paris at his state funeral in a leaden box covered in flowers.59
Potemkin’s viscera were said to be buried in the Church of the Ascension at the Golia Monastery in Jassy. There was no apparent sign of it in the church, but through the centuries of the Kingdom of Rumania, Communism and now democracy a few intellectuals knew that it rests in a golden box under the carpet and flagstone before the Hospodar of Moldavia’s red-velvet medieval throne. So the brain that had conceived the Kingdom of Dacia lay beneath the portrait of a bearded Moldavian Prince, Basil the Wolf, wearing a gold, white and red kaftan and a bonnet with three feathers.60
Potemkin’s family had not forgotten the place of the Prince’s death in the hills of Bessarabia, marked by the lance of Cossack Golavaty.61 Samoilov had a small, square Classical pillar built there in 1792, with the date and event engraved on its sides: its design and white stone is so similar to the fountain built at the Nikolaev palace that it must be by the same architect, Starov himself. Later, in the early nineteenth century, Potemkin’s heirs erected a pyramid ten metres high in dark stone with steps rising up to it.*7
Catherine the Great & Potemkin Page 76