Potemkin and Suvorov were both eccentrics. In pure military genius, Suvorov surpassed Potemkin. The prince was a resourceful soldier, but he was cautious and distracted by political affairs. He excelled as a statesman, an administrator, and a military strategist, but he lacked Suvorov’s aptitude for quick, intuitive battlefield decisions. They complemented each other. Potemkin provided Suvorov with the strategy, the troops, and the supplies; Suvorov provided Potemkin and Russia with the victories. Potemkin always insisted that the highest rewards be given to Suvorov, demanding, for example, that he be given the Order of St. Andrew before other, more senior generals.
The Turks began the war with an assault on the Russian fort on Kinburn, the spit of land on the eastern bank of the Dnieper estuary across from Ochakov. Two attempted landings at Kinburn were beaten off by Suvorov, whose battlefield preference was the use of cold steel. “The bullet is a fool, the bayonet a brave lad” was his philosophy. Employing these tactics, the Russians charged the Turks as they disembarked from their boats and slaughtered most of them while their feet were still wet. This Russian victory was offset, however, by the wounding of Suvorov in the battle, and by a subsequent gale, which caught the Russian fleet sailing from Sebastopol; one large ship went down and others were damaged. Dismayed by this harm to his beloved ships, Potemkin spoke of evacuating the Crimea and resigning all his commands. Catherine’s response was indignation. “You are impatient like a five-year-old child, while the affairs of which you are now in charge require an imperturbable patience,” she wrote to him. “You belong to the state and you belong to me. My friend, neither time nor distance, nor anyone in the world will change my thoughts of you and about you.” To which she added her guess (correct, as it turned out) that the storm had damaged the Turkish fleet equally. Potemkin apologized, blaming his loss of nerve on his sensitivity, his headaches, and his hemorrhoids.
When winter ice formed on the Dnieper, both sides suspended campaigning, and it was not until the following May that Potemkin had fifty thousand men positioned before Ochakov. Even then, he seemed not to be in a hurry. Assuming that the fortress must eventually fall, and fearing the losses that would accompany an all-out attempt to storm the ramparts, he deliberately held back an assault and waited for a voluntary surrender. Personally, he was not a coward; during the long siege, he continually exposed himself to danger. Convinced that he was protected by God, he would appear in the line of fire wearing his parade uniform, making himself a prime target. His self-confidence was reinforced when a cannonball killed an officer standing just behind him. To his men, he said, “Children, I forbid you to get up for me and wantonly expose yourselves to Turkish bullets.” Suvorov disagreed with this strategy of caution; he believed in the sudden, decisive blow, accepting whatever losses he must. When Potemkin restrained him from storming Ochakov, saying, “Relying on God’s help, I will try to get it cheaply,” Suvorov replied, “You cannot capture a fortress merely by looking at it.” They continued to admire each other. When Suvorov was wounded, Potemkin wrote, “My dear friend, you alone mean more to me than ten thousand others.” Suvorov replied, “May the Prince Gregory Alexandrovich live long! He is an honest man, he is a good man, he is a great man, and I would be happy to die for him!”
The siege continued; an unpleasant feature was the Turkish practice of beheading Russian prisoners and mounting the heads on stakes along the ramparts. Finally, in December 1788, the second winter of the siege, when the army was suffering from the cold, Potemkin yielded. Promising his men that they could sack the city once the fortress was taken, he organized his assault force into six columns of five thousand men each and sent them forward at four o’clock in the morning on December 6. The assault lasted only four hours and was one of the bloodiest battles in Russian military history; it is said that twenty thousand Russians and thirty thousand Turks died that morning. But with the taking of Ochakov, the path to the Dniester and the Danube lay open.
During the following year, 1789, the whole course of the Dneister fell to the Russian army. The fortress towns of Ackkerman and Bender capitulated without a fight—and Bender alone had a garrison of twenty thousand men. That same year, Belgrade and Bucharest were taken by the Austrians. In February 1790, however, Catherine’s friend and ally Emperor Joseph II died of tuberculosis. Joseph was childless, and he was succeeded by his brother, Leopold, Grand Duke of Tuscany, who became Emperor Leopold II. Leopold had little interest in continuing Austria’s war with Turkey. In June 1790, he and the sultan agreed on an armistice, and in August, they concluded a peace, leaving Catherine to fight alone. Despite Austria’s withdrawal, the Russian army reached the lower Danube, capturing one town after another until they reached Izmail, one of the most formidable fortresses in Europe. This massive bastion of towers and ramparts, defended by thirty-five thousand men and 265 cannon, was surrounded by thirty thousand Russians with six hundred cannon. By late November 1790 no progress had been made, and the three Russian generals commanding the army were preparing to withdraw. Worried, Potemkin sent for Suvorov, giving him the freedom to launch an assault or abandon the siege, as he thought best. “Hurry up, my dear friend,” he wrote. “My only hope is in God and your valor. There are too many generals there equal in rank and the result is a kind of indecisive parliament.” Suvorov arrived on December 2, resited the Russian artillery, began a punishing bombardment, and informed Potemkin that he would begin the assault within five days. He called on the Turks to surrender, warning, “If Izmail resists, no one will be spared.” The Turkish commander spurned the demand. The Russian assault began at dawn. The Turks fought on the ramparts, at the gates, and in every street and house. They were overwhelmed by the fury of the Russian attack. Then, as he had promised the army before the assault, Suvorov unleashed his men for three days of looting.
During the years 1788–90, Russia was fighting two wars, in the north as well as the south. In June 1788, Gustavus III, king of Sweden, seeing an opportunity to recover the lands lost to Peter the Great in the early century, succumbed to the temptation offered by the concentration of the Russian army in the south. His objectives were to retake Finland and strip away Russia’s Baltic provinces; if he failed to do this, he melodramatically promised to follow the path of Queen Christina a century before, renounce the throne, convert to Catholicism, and move to Rome. On July 1, 1788, Catherine received his ultimatum, which went beyond demanding the return of all former Swedish territories on the Baltic. He now also insisted that the empress accept Swedish mediation in the Russo-Turkish war and restore to Turkey the Crimea and all other Ottoman territory won since 1768. A final insult in this provocative document referred to the “aid” he had given Russia by not attacking the empress during her first Turkish war and during the Pugachev rebellion. In Stockholm, Gustavus boasted that he would soon be breakfasting in Peterhof, and then go on to St. Peterburg, where he would tear down a statue of Peter the Great and replace it with one of himself. Catherine categorized the ultimatum as “this insane note,” which she had received from “Sir John Falstaff.” To Potemkin, she described the king as donning “breastplate, thigh pieces, armlets and a helmet with an enormous number of plumes.… What have I done that God should choose to chastise me with such a feeble instrument as the king of Sweden?”
In July 1789, Gustavus invaded Finland and sent his fleet up the Gulf of Finland; his army failed on land and his navy was only partially successful at sea. In the end, the war was inconclusive, the more so for Sweden, because Catherine, fully engaged against Turkey, had only to maintain the status quo in the Baltic in order to succeed. In the summer of 1790, Gustavus asked for peace. The Swedish-Russian peace agreement of August 3 left all frontiers exactly where they had been before the king had posted his “insane note.” Catherine was relieved. Writing to Potemkin, who was still fighting the Turks, she said, “We have pulled one paw out of the mud [in the Baltic]. As soon as we pull out the other [in the south], we’ll sing alleluia.”
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The
second war with Turkey proved a rich source of colorful stories to add to the legend of Gregory Potemkin. One was the tale of the subterranean headquarters he had constructed for himself while his army was besieging Ochakov. It told of an enormous underground hall of marble, rows of pillars made of lapis lazuli, enormous chandeliers, myriads of candles, huge mirrors, and platoons of lackeys in powdered wigs and gold brocade waiting to serve. It is not much easier to believe the report that Potemkin was keeping an entire theater company and a symphony orchestra of one hundred musicians to provide inspiration or distraction. There are also extravagant accounts of the love affairs Potemkin supposedly conducted while in the Ochakov camp. It was said that he kept a harem of beautiful women, including both Princess Catherine Dolgoruky, whose husband was serving under his command, and the beautiful Prascovia Potemkina, wife of his kinsman Paul Potemkin.
The most remarkable phenomenon at Ochakov, however, was Potemkin himself. The Prince de Ligne, the Austrian field marshal who had joined Catherine and Potemkin on the Crimean journey, was at Russian headquarters to urge Potemkin to storm the fortress in order to draw Turkish troops away from the Austrian campaign in the Balkans. Despite Potemkin’s protracted refusal to attack, Ligne was overwhelmingly impressed by the man before him. To his friend Philippe de Ségur in St. Petersburg, he wrote:
I here behold a Commander in Chief who looks idle and is always busy; who has no other desk than his knees, no other comb than his fingers; constantly reclined on his couch, yet sleeping neither in night nor in daytime. A cannon shot, to which he himself is not exposed, disturbs him with the idea that it costs the life of some of his soldiers. Trembling for others, brave himself, alarmed at the approach of danger, frolicsome when it surrounds him, dull in the midst of pleasure, surfeited with everything, easily disgusted, morose, inconstant, a profound philosopher, an able minister, a sublime politician, not revengeful, asking pardon for a pain he has inflicted, quickly repairing an injustice, thinking he loves God when he fears the Devil; waving one hand to the females that please him, and with the other making the sign of the cross; receiving numberless presents from his sovereign and distributing them immediately to others; preferring prodigality in giving, to regularity in paying; prodigiously rich and not worth a farthing; easily prejudiced in favor of or against anything; talking divinity to his generals and tactics to his bishops; never reading, but pumping everyone with whom he converses; uncommonly affable or extremely savage, the most attractive or most repulsive of manners; concealing under the appearance of harshness, the greatest benevolence of heart, like a child, wanting to have everything, or, like a great man, knowing how to do without; gnawing his fingers, or apples, or turnips; scolding or laughing; engaged in wantonness or in prayers, summoning twenty aides de camp and saying nothing to any of them, not caring for cold, though he appears unable to exist without furs; always in his shirt without pants, or in rich regimentals; barefoot or in slippers; almost bent double when he is at home, and tall, erect, proud, handsome, noble, majestic when he shows himself to his army like Agamemnon in the midst of the monarchs of Greece. What then is his magic? Genius, natural abilities, an excellent memory, artifice without craft, the art of conquering every heart; much generosity, graciousness, and justice in his rewards; and a consummate knowledge of mankind.
There is another story related to this Russian war with Turkey—this one is true—which centers on a figure few connect with Catherine of Russia or Gregory Potemkin. This figure is John Paul Jones, whom Americans know as the father of the United States Navy.
Jones began as nobody and he died alone, rejected, and, once again, nobody. In the interim, however, he achieved the fame he desperately craved. He was born John Paul—Jones was added later—an obscure, impoverished gardener’s son on the bank of Solway Firth in Scotland. At thirteen, he went to sea as an unpaid cabin boy aboard a merchant vessel bound for Barbados and Virginia. In 1766, at nineteen, he joined an African slave ship as third mate and remained in the slave trade for four years. At twenty-three, he became master of a merchant vessel on which his seamanship was unchallenged but men were wary of his prickly temper. He was slight and wiry, five feet five inches tall, with hazel eyes, a sharp nose, high cheekbones, and a strong cleft chin. He dressed neatly, more like a naval officer than a merchant captain, and always wore a sword. This blade was used in the West Indies to run through the ringleader of a group of mutineers in his crew. Uncertain whether the law would applaud him for suppression of mutiny or try him for murder, he changed his name from John Paul to John Jones and sailed on the next ship leaving the harbor.
In the summer of 1775, Jones was in Philadelphia seeking a place in the infant navy of the rebellious American colonies; he became the first naval first lieutenant commissioned by the Continental Congress. A year later, after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, he sailed for Europe, hoping to find a frigate to command. The French government, spurred by news of British general John Burgoyne’s surrender at Saratoga, was moving toward full recognition of America’s independence, and Benjamin Franklin, the American representative in Paris, became Jones’s patron. With Franklin’s help, Jones took command of a French East Indiaman, a travel-worn merchant ship of nine hundred tons. Jones armed her with thirty cannon and named her Bonhomme Richard, after Franklin’s famous work Poor Richard’s Almanack.
On August 14, 1779, Jones sailed on the voyage that made him famous. Off the North Sea Yorkshire coast, he encountered a forty-four-ship Baltic convoy laden with naval stores for England, under escort by a fast, maneuverable, fifty-gun British frigate, HMS Serapis, commanded by a veteran Royal Navy captain. Jones attacked. The battle, beginning at 6:30 p.m., continued for four hours under a harvest moon. The two ships, locked together yardarm to yardarm by American grappling hooks, pounded each other with shot. At one point amid the carnage, the British captain called across his deck to Jones, “Has your ship struck her colors?” He was referring to the signal of surrender. Someone heard—or perhaps a writer sitting at his desk later imagined—Jones call back, “I have not yet begun to fight.” The battle continued until, with Bonhomme Richard sinking and Serapis on fire, the British captain suddenly struck. Jones transferred his wounded and the rest of his crew to his captured prize, put out the fire, and returned to France. In Paris, he was a hero. At Versailles, Louis XVI made him a chevalier of the Military Order of Merit and presented him with a gold-hilted sword. His celebrity and self-confidence attracted women and he had a succession of affairs, one of which apparently resulted in a small, unexpected son.
Jones never gave up wanting to become an American admiral, but no American naval officer was promoted to that rank until the American Civil War. He returned to Paris, and in December 1787, Thomas Jefferson, who had succeeded Franklin as American minister to France, told him that the Russian minister in Paris wished to know whether Jones would be interested in a high command in the Russian navy: command of the Black Sea Fleet with an admiral’s rank. Jones grasped the offer: if not an American admiral, perhaps a Russian admiral.
The new admiral arrived in St. Petersburg on May 4, and Catherine wrote to Grimm, “Paul Jones has just arrived here; he has entered my service. I saw him today. I think he will suit our purpose admirably.” Jones’s view of her was equally optimistic: “I was entirely captivated and put myself into her hands without making any stipulation for my personal advantage. I demanded but one favor: that she would never condemn me without hearing me.” He traveled south and met Potemkin at Ekaterinoslav. Assuming that he was to take supreme command of the Black Sea Fleet, he passed through Kherson to the Liman estuary. There, to his dismay, he found himself in the company of three other rear admirals, including the prince of Nassau-Siegen, none of whom was willing to concede superiority in rank to Jones. Potemkin refused to intervene.
The theater of operations was the Liman estuary, thirty miles long, nowhere more than eight miles wide, and nowhere more than eighteen feet deep; large warships, whose movements were subject to th
e direction of the wind, found it difficult to maneuver without running aground. Jones was given command of the squadron of larger ships that included one ship of the line and eight frigates. If his enemy, the Turks, decided to enter these narrow, congested waters in force, they could bring as many as eighteen ships of the line and forty frigates, along with numerous oar-propelled galleys, rowed by slaves chained to their seats. The Russians also had a flotilla of twenty-five oar-propelled, shallow-draft galleys, but their commander, the prince of Nassau-Siegen, was independent of Jones, and took orders only from Potemkin. A battle with the Turks on June 5 was inconclusive, and afterward Russian commanders argued about tactics and credit for their success in forcing the Turks to withdraw. Potemkin sided with Nassau-Siegen. “It is to you alone that I attribute victory,” he wrote. To Catherine, Potemkin wrote, “Nassau was the real hero and to him belongs the victory.” The battle resumed ten days later, and Jones found himself in difficulty—not with the Turks, but with the Russians. He did not speak Russian, and there was no agreed-on method of signaling between his ships; the admiral had to have himself rowed in a small boat so that he could shout instructions to his captains; even these had to be given through an interpreter. Nevertheless, he won; the Turkish flagship ran aground and was destroyed. Nassau-Siegen took the credit. “Our victory is complete,” he wrote to his wife. “My flotilla did it. Oh what a poor man is Paul Jones! I am master of the Liman. Poor Paul Jones! No place for him on this great day!” Throughout his life, Jones had displayed an intense desire to have his merit recognized. He wrote to Potemkin, “I hope to be subjected to no more humiliation and to find myself soon in the situation that was promised me when I was invited to enter Her Imperial Majesty’s Navy.” Instead, Potemkin relieved Jones of command, explaining to the empress that “nobody wished to serve under him.” By the end of October, Jones was back in St. Petersburg, where he was received by Catherine and told to wait for an assignment with the Baltic Fleet.
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