When the body reached Kherson, it was not buried, simply laid in an unsealed, specially constructed tomb in a crypt62 in the middle of St Catherine’s Church. The Empress ordered a noble marble monument to be designed and erected over the tomb, but by the time she died, five years later, the marble was still not ready. So the Prince, a parvenu who was somehow royal, remained interred but somehow unburied.63 Visitors and locals, including Suvorov, prayed there.
In 1798, Paul heard about these visits and decided to avenge himself on the body: it irritated him all over again that Potemkin was still managing to defy tradition and decency seven years after his death. So he issued a decree on 18 April to Procurator-General Prince Alexander Kurakin: the body was unburied and, ‘finding this obscene, His Majesty orders that the body be secretly buried in the crypt in the tomb designed for this and the crypt should be covered up by earth and flattened as if it had never been there’. For a man of Potemkin’s stature to be buried without trace was bad enough. The Emperor allegedly ordered Kurakin orally to smash any memorial to Potemkin and to scatter the bones in the nearby Devil’s Gorge. Under cover of darkness, the tomb was filled in and covered up, but no one knew whether the officers had obeyed Paul’s orders. Had the bones been tossed into the Gorge, buried secretly in a pauper’s grave or taken away by Countess Branicka?64 For a long time, no one was sure.65
In another midnight grave opening, on 4 July 1818, the Archbishop of Ekaterinoslav, Iov Potemkin, a cousin of Serenissimus, lifted the church floor, opened the coffin and discovered that the embalmed cadaver was still there after all. So it turned out that, in this as in so much else, the despotic whims of Emperor Paul were fudged by his officers. But they had obeyed him in making it look as if there was nothing there. Iov Potemkin was said to have placed some artefact from the grave in his carriage when he left: was this an act of familial and episcopal grave-robbing? Or was it the urn containing a special part of the body? Was the Prince still there after the Archbishop’s tinkering?66
Every nocturnal burrowing sowed more doubts. But that is the trouble with secrecy, darkness and graves. In 1859 yet another official commission decided to open the grave to prove that the Prince was still there: when they opened the tomb, they discovered a large crypt, a wooden coffin inside a lead one and a gold fringe to go round it. Milgov, a local bureaucrat, tidied up the crypt and closed it again.67
Now that everyone was finally sure there was a grave there, it was decided there should be a grandiose gravestone. But no one could recall where exactly the tomb had been, so they did not know where to put it. This sounds like a poor excuse for some more digging by inquisitive busybodies. In 1873, another commission excavated and found the wooden coffin containing a skull with the triangular hole in the back left by Massot’s embalming, and tufts of dark-blonde hair, the remnants of the coiffure that was said to be finest in Russia, as well as three medals, clothes and gold-braid scraps of uniform. They sealed it up again and constructed a fitting gravestone approximately above the tomb.68 Finally, Potemkin, if it was he, was allowed some peace.
Then came the Revolution: the Bolsheviks gleefully dug up the graveyard of St Catherine’s that contained the bodies of officers killed in the siege of Ochakov. There are yellowed photographs, kept by the local priest today, that show a macabre revolutionary scene; crowds of peasants in the clothes of 1918 point at the wizened skeletons still with hair, wearing the braided tailcoats, breeches and boots of Catherine’s era – while in the background we can spot the jackboots and leather coats of the Chekist secret police.69
Twelve years later, in 1930, a young writer named Boris Lavrenev returned to his hometown of Kherson to visit his sick father. He went for a walk through the fortress and saw a sign outside St Catherine’s that read ‘Kherson’s Anti-Religious Museum’. Inside he saw a pyramidal glass case. There was ‘a round brown thing’ inside it. When he got closer, he saw it was a skull. On the table next to it was written: ‘The skull of Catherine II’s lover Potemkin’. In the next-door case there was a skeleton, still with shrivelled muscles on the bones. A sign read: ‘The Bones of Catherine II’s lover Potemkin’. In the third case, there were remains of a green velvet jacket, white satin trousers and rotten stockings and shoes – Potemkin’s clothes.
Lavrenev rushed out of the church and sent a telegram to the ministry in charge of protecting art. When he was back in Leningrad, a friend wrote to tell him that the ‘museum’ was closed. Potemkin was gathered up, put in a new coffin in the vault and bricked up again. ‘So in 1930 in Kherson,’ wrote Lavrenev, ‘Field-Marshal Serenissimus Prince Grigory Alexandrovich Potemkin, who was the exhibit of the Kherson Anti-Religious Museum, was buried for the second time.’70
On 11 May 1984, the mystery of Potemkin once again proved irresistible to local bureaucrats: the chief of Kherson’s Forensic Medical Department L.G. Boguslavsky opened the tomb and found ‘31 human bones…belonging to the skeleton of a man, probably of 185 cm…of about 52–55 years old’ who had probably been dead for about 200 years. But there were apparently some epaulettes in the coffin too, said to belong to a British officer of the time of the Crimean War. The coffin was more modern, but it had a Catholic as well as an Orthodox cross on it. The analysts decided this was undoubtedly Potemkin.
In July 1986, Boguslavsky wrote to Professor Evgeny Anisimov, the distinguished eighteenth-century scholar, who was unconvinced by the evidence: if it was Potemkin, why a Catholic cross on the coffin and why the British epaulettes? Were they concluding that this was Potemkin out of wishful thinking instead of forensic analysis? Quite apart from the fascinating question of the identity of the British officer whose uniform was found there, was it Potemkin or not?
The size, age and dating of the body were right. The old coffins, leaden, gilded or wooden, as well as the medals, any remaining icons and the clothes, all disappeared in the Revolution. The Catholic coffin, which was shorter than the skeleton, was probably supplied in 1930. The English epaulettes are from another grave, the relics of the ignorant Bolshevik pilfering. So, in 1986, the Prince of Taurida was once again buried for, if one counts the viscera of Jassy and all the other excavations, the eighth time – and again forgotten.71
St Catherine’s Church is now again filled with worshippers. The first thing one sees if one peers from the outside between Starov’s Classical pillars is a wooden and iron rail around a solitary flat white marble gravestone, seven foot long and three wide, that lies right in the middle underneath the cupola. Inside, beneath a large gilded crest set on the stone, one reads:
Field Marshal
Serenissimus Prince
Grigory Alexandrovich
Potemkin of Taurida
Born 30th September 1739
Died 5th October 1791.
Buried here 23rd November 1791
Around the edge of the marble there are seven gilded rosettes, each engraved with his victories and cities.*8 An old lady is selling candles at the door. Potemkin? ‘You must wait for the priest, Father Anatoly,’ she says. Father Anatoly, with long straight blond hair, blue eyes and the tranquillity of clergy in provincial towns, represents a new generation of young Orthodox brought up under Communism and he is most pleased to show a foreigner the tomb of Potemkin. No one has opened the tomb for a few years and no foreigner has ever seen it.
Father Anatoly lights six candles, walks to the middle of the floor and opens a concealed wooden trapdoor. The steep steps fall away into darkness. Father Anatoly leads the way and uses the wax to stick the first candle to the wall. This lights up a narrow passageway. As he walks along he fixes other candles to illuminate the way until he reaches a small chamber: it was once lined with icons and contained the silver, lead and wooden coffins of Potemkin, ‘all stolen by the Communists’. The simple wooden coffin, with a cross on it, stands on a raised dais in the midst of the vault. The priest sticks the remaining candles around the chamber to light it up. Then he opens the lid of the coffin: there is smal
l black bag inside containing the skull and the numbered bones of Prince Potemkin. That is all.
There is one final mystery: the heart. It was not buried at Golia like the entrails and brains but was placed in a golden urn. But where was it taken? Samoilov said it was placed under the throne of St Catherine’s in Kherson, but Father Anatoly says there is no trace of it. The likeliest scenario for the heart is that it this was the object removed by Archbishop Iov Potemkin in 1818. Where did he take it – Branicka’s estate or Chizhova, where Serenissimus asked to be buried? Today, the villagers of Chizhova still believe the heart of Potemkin was buried there in the family church where he learned to sing and read.
This would be most fitting: the Empire, which Serenissimus did so much to build, is in ruins today and most of Potemkin’s conquests are no longer Russian. If his innards are in Rumania and his bones in Ukraine, it seems right that his heart rests in Russia.
Roar on, roar on, O waterfall!
Gavrili Derzhavin, The Waterfall
Skip Notes
*1 It is now appropriately Iaşi University’s School of Medicine, though others say the autopsy was conducted in the Cantacuzino Palace.
*2 Mikhail Potemkin died strangely in his carriage on his way home from Jassy. His brother Count Pavel Potemkin was later accused of murdering and robbing a Persian prince when he was viceroy of the Caucasus: he wrote a poem pleading his innocence, then died of a fever. Some said he committed suicide.
*3 The almost 4 million of his ‘private’ income sounds much too low considering Catherine regularly bought his palaces for sums like half a million roubles. The sums of State money were much more than the entire annual revenue of the whole Russian Empire, which usually oscillated between forty and forty-four million roubles – though it was rising fast.
*4 This disappeared a few years after Potemkin’s funeral. Two hundred years later in October 1998, the author, assisted by a Rumanian priest and two professors, began to search the Golia church in Jassy and found the board and its beautifully inscribed memorial under a piano behind a pile of prayer books: it was dusty but undamaged.
*5 Indeed George V was so worried that he banned the film from being shown to the schoolboys of Eton: ‘It is not good for the boys to witness mutinies, especially naval mutinies.’
*6 In 1906 the State Duma, Tsar Nicholas II’s reluctant concession to the 1905 Revolution, sat in what had been the Winter Garden. After the February Revolution, it housed for a while both the Provisional Government of Russia and the Petrograd Soviet.
*7 The site was lost and presumably destroyed: no one had recorded seeing this spot since the early nineteenth century. Unmarked on maps and unknown even to local academics, it survived only on a 1913 Austrian map, but it seemed unlikely that the monuments could exist today. Yet they are still there on a country lane on a Bessarabian hillside, known only by the local peasants who took the author to ‘Potemkin’s place’, which has survived Russian and Ottoman rule, the Kingdom of Rumania, annexation by Stalin in 1940, German occupation and its return to Rumania, re-inclusion in the Soviet Union and the creation of the independent Republic of Moldova.
*8 The top row reads ‘Ochakov 1788, Crimea and Kuban 1783, Kherson 1778’. The two in the middle: ‘Akkerman 1789’ and ‘Ekaterinoslav 1787’. At the bottom: ‘Bender 1789’ and ‘Nikolaev 1788’.
Serenissimus Prince Grigory Potemkin in his prime when he was already Catherine the Great’s secret husband and increasingly her partner in power. Catherine called him her ‘marble beauty’ and he was said to have the most beautiful head of hair in Russia. Yet he was shy about his blind eye and was always painted from this angle to hide it.
Catherine the Great, dressed in Guardsman’s uniform, on 28th June 1762 – the day she seized power from her husband, Emperor Peter III. This was the occasion she met Potemkin for the first time. As she reviewed her troops outside the Winter Palace in St Petersburg, she noticed she was missing her sword-knot. Young Potemkin galloped up and offered her his own. She did not forget him.
Countess Alexandra ‘Sashenka’ Branicka, clever, lithe and formidable, was Potemkin’s niece, probably his mistress, but certainly his best friend after Catherine herself. He died in her arms.
The Heir – Grand Duke (later Emperor) Paul, Catherine’s unstable, embittered son who so hated Potemkin, he boasted he would toss him in jail.
Potemkin’s palaces: his northern and southern houses. The neo-Classical Taurida Palace in St Petersburg, the scene of the Prince’s sumptuous ball in 1791.
His first palace, the Anichkov in Petersburg
The Bablovo Palace in ruins near Tsarskoe Selo
The Ostrovki Castle. Both were inspired by Walpole’s Gothic Strawberry Hill.
The ‘Potemkin Palace’ in Ekaterinoslav
The Prince’s Palace in Turkish style in Nikolaev – he longed to visit this residence as he lay dying.
His huge palace in the centre of Kherson, his first city
The Empress aged 58 in her travelling costume during Potemkin’s magnificent 1787 tour of the Crimea where she met Emperor Joseph II.
Serenissimus at his apogee at the time of the Crimean trip and the start of the Russo-Turkish War: here in the uniform of Grand Admiral of the Black Sea Fleet with Catherine’s portrait, his proudest possession, set in diamonds on his chest.
Bottom: his signature.
The ageing Empress during the 1790s: still majestic and dignified but growing fat and breathless. As she told Potemkin, she was so in love with her talentless young lover, Zubov, that she felt like a fat fly in summer. She yearned for his approval of her last favourite…
Prince Potemkin-Tavrichesky as the triumphant warlord on his last visit to Petersburg in 1791 when he was ebullient and volatile as ever. Catherine thought victory made him even more handsome. Even his enemies admitted ‘women crave the embraces of Prince Potemkin.’
The monuments by the roadside (in Moldova) where Potemkin died on 5th October 1791.
This board announced Potemkin’s death and listed all his titles during his lying-in-state in October 1791. The author found it in the Golia Monastery in Jassy (Romania) behind a piano.
His coffin in the tomb beneath the Church. The Bolsheviks stole the icons…
The trapdoor in St Catherine’s in Kherson (Ukraine) leading to Potemkin’s tomb.
The ruined church in Potemkin’s home village of Chizhova, near Smolensk in Russia where he was christened, learned to read, and where his heart is probably buried.
Potemkin aged around 35 at the height of his passionate love affair with Catherine, wearing the gold breastplates and uniform of the Captain of the elite Chevalier-Gardes, who stood watch over the Empress’s own apartments.
Daria Potemkina, the Prince’s mother who disapproved of his affairs with his nieces and told him so. He tossed her letters into the fire…
The Empress Elisabeth: statuesque, blue-eyed, blonde, shrewd and ruthless, a true daughter of Peter the Great with a taste for men, dresses, transvestite balls, and Orthodox piety. After being presented to her, young Potemkin lost interest in his studies…
The Grand Duchess Catherine with her gawky husband Peter and their son Paul. She loathed her husband – and Paul was probably her son by Serge Saltykov, her first lover.
Field-Marshal Peter Rumiantsev in command at the Battle of Kagul against the Turks in 1770. General Potemkin’s heroic exploits in this campaign made him a war hero.
The Orlov brothers who helped Catherine seize power. Good-natured Grigory (top) was her lover for twelve years. Brutal, scarfaced Alexei (bottom) helped murder Peter III and won the naval battle of Chesme against the Turks. Potemkin broke their influe
nce.
A fanciful print of Catherine and Potemkin playing cards in her boudoir. In fact, they played usually in the Little Hermitage where the Empress made special rules for him – ‘Do not break or chew anything’ – because he liked to wander in, chewing a radish and wearing nothing but a dressing-gown and a pink bandanna.
Alexander Lanskoy, Catherine’s lover 1780–1784. He was gentle, affectionate and unambitious. She was happiest with him. When he died, Potemkin rushed to console her, and courtiers heard them howling together with grief.
Count Alexander Dmitriyev-Mamonov, Catherine’s penultimate favourite and kinsman of Potemkin. She nicknamed him ‘Redcoat’. He broke the Empress’s heart by falling in love with a lady-in-waiting. ‘Spit on him,’ said Potemkin.
Catherine the Great & Potemkin Page 77