Catherine the Great & Potemkin Read online

  After gathering at their base, Leghorn (Livorno) in Tuscany, Orlov’s fleet finally reached Ottoman waters. It failed to raise a rebellion among the tricky Greeks and Montenegrins and then indecisively engaged the Turkish fleet off Chios. The Turks withdrew to the deceptive safety of Chesme harbour. Samuel Greig arranged a fiery lullaby for the sleeping Turks. Overnight on 25/26 June, his fireships floated into the harbour of Chesme. This ‘ingenious ambuscade’ turned the harbour into an inferno. ‘Encumbered with ships, powder and artillery,’ Chesme, wrote Baron de Tott, watching from the Turkish side, ‘soon became a volcano that engulfed the whole naval force of the Turks’.29 Eleven thousand Turks perished. Alexei Orlov boasted to Catherine that the water of Chesme was stained incarnadine, and the victorious Empress passed this macabre and distinctly unEnlightened vision on to an excited Voltaire.30 It was the most disastrous day for Turkish arms since the Battle of Lepanto.

  When news of Chesme reached St Petersburg, so soon after the glories of Kagul, the Russian capital exploded with joy. There were ‘Te Deums’ and rewards for every sailor in the fleet inscribed simply: ‘I was there.’ Catherine rewarded Rumiantsev for Kagul with his field-marshal’s baton and the construction of an obelisk in her park at Tsarskoe Selo, while Alexei Orlov got the title of Chesmensky (‘of Chesme’). It was the greatest array of Russian triumphs since Poltava. Catherine was riding high – especially in Europe: Voltaire actually jumped up and down on his sickbed at Ferney and sang at the thought of so many dead infidels.31

  Potemkin had covered himself in glory in this year of Russian victories and decided to capitalize on his new success. When operations ceased in November 1770, he asked Rumiantsev for leave to go to St Petersburg. Had someone raised his hopes that Catherine would receive him with open arms? Afterwards, Potemkin’s enemies claimed that Rumiantsev was relieved to be rid of him. But he actually admired Potemkin’s brains and military record, and approved this trip, charging him to protect the interests of himself and his army. His letters to his protégé were as paternal as Potemkin’s to him were filial.

  Potemkin returned to Petersburg with the prestige of a war hero and Rumiantsev’s enthusiastic recommendations: ‘This officer of great ability can make far-sighted observations about the land which has been the theatre of war, which deserve your Majesty’s attention and respect and, because of this, I’m entrusting him with all the events that have to be reported to Her Majesty.’32

  The Empress, in an exultant mood after Kagul and Chesme, welcomed him warmly: we know from the Court Journal that he was invited to dine with Catherine eleven times during his short stay.33 Legend says there was a private audience at which Potemkin could not resist more dramatics on bended knee. He and Catherine agreed to correspond, apparently through her librarian Petrov and trusted Chamberlain Ivan Perfilevich Yelagin – useful allies around the Empress. We know little of what happened behind closed doors but one senses that they felt the stirrings of something that both knew could become serious.*2 Whether the private state of Catherine’s relationship with Grigory Orlov himself was already shaky, Count Alexei Orlov-Chesmensky had increased the family credit at Court. Potemkin was too early to displace Grigory Orlov, but the trip was not wasted.34

  Grigory Orlov certainly noticed Potemkin’s welcome and made sure he returned to the army. Potemkin went back late in February, bearing a letter from Orlov to Rumiantsev in which the favourite recommended Potemkin and asked his commander to be his ‘tutor and guide’. This was a benign way for Orlov to remind his younger rival of his place, but also a sign that he had become much more important on that trip to Petersburg. He was marked.35

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  Within weeks, the fighting had started again. But, compared to the feats of the year before, 1771 was to be a disappointment in the theatre of Moldavia and Wallachia, today’s Rumania, where Potemkin served. When the Turks sensibly refused to endure any more of Rumiantsev’s battles, the Field-Marshal spent the year attacking Turkish positions on the lower Danube, pushing into Wallachia. Potemkin did well: given the task of holding the Kraovsky region, he ‘not only repulsed the enemy…but struck at him too. He was the first to head across the Danube.’ On 5 May, he pulled off a minor coup when he attacked the small town of Zimbry on the other side of the Danube, ravaged it, burned enemy provisions and stole the ships of their flotilla, which he brought back to the Russian side of the river. On 17 May, Potemkin defeated and pursued 4,000 Turks near the Ol’ta river – ‘a glorious and famous feat’, according to Rumiantsev, ‘achieved only thanks to Potemkin’s skill and courage’. The Turks attacked him on 27 May but were defeated and driven off. He joined up with Repnin again, and together they drove off a powerful Turkish corps under a seraskier (Turkish equivalent of a field-marshal) on 10 June and then took36 Bucharest.

  Some time after this fighting advance, Potemkin was struck down by a dangerous fever, which was endemic in the summer months in these Danubian principalities. It was so serious that ‘only his strong constitution allowed him to recover because he would not accept any help from doctors’, wrote Samoilov. Instead, the prone general put himself in the hands of two Zaporogian Cossacks, whom he charged to take care of him and spray him with cooling water. He had always been interested in the exotic peoples of the Empire – hence his position at the Legislative Commission – but this is our first hint of his special friendship with the Cossacks. He studied the culture of his Cossacks and admired their freedom and joie de vivre. They nicknamed him ‘Gritsko Nechosa’, or ‘Grey Wig’, after the peruke he sometimes wore, and invited him to become an honorary Cossack. A few months later, on 15 April 1772, he wrote to their Hetman to ask for admittance into this martial order. Entered into the lists of the Zaporogian Host in May that year, he wrote to the Hetman: ‘I am delighted.’37

  Potemkin had recovered by the time the army crossed the Danube and made a thrust towards the key Turkish fortress of Silistria, which commanded a stretch of the Danube. It was here that Potemkin won the undying hostility of Count Simon Romanovich Vorontsov, a young scion of the family that had reached its peak under Peter III. Born in 1744, the cultured Vorontsov, son of a notoriously corrupt provincial governor (nicknamed Big Pocket), nephew of Peter III’s Chancellor, had been arrested during the coup for supporting Peter III, but he later made a name for himself as the first officer in to the Turkish trenches at Kagul. Like all Vorontsovs, this pudding-faced Anglophile had a marked appreciation of his own credentials but was rightly regarded by Catherine and Potemkin as politically unreliable and spent most of his career in honourable exile as Ambassador to London. Now, outside Silistria, he had to face the indignity of having his Grenadiers rescued from 12,000 Turkish cavalry by a reluctant Potemkin.

  Six days later, Potemkin was in turn saved by Vorontsov: ‘not only did we cover him, but we chased those Turks into town’, using three batteries of artillery, and killing ‘lots’. Vorontsov, writing in 1796, cited both fights as evidence of his own virtuosity and Potemkin’s incompetence. Both found it intolerable to be saved by the other. The malice was perfectly symmetrical.38

  Silistria did not fall, the army reforded the Danube and there ended Rumiantsev’s tepid campaign. The real action that June was the successful invasion of the weakened Khanate of the Crimea – its army was away on the Danube, facing Rumiantsev – by the Second Army, now commanded by Prince Vasily Dolgoruky.

  Catherine was learning that glory was not as quick or cheap as she hoped. The bottomless maw of the army demanded more and more recruits. The harvests were bad. Soldiers’ pay was in arrears. Fever ravaged the army while rashes of bubonic plague broke out across the Ottoman Empire. The Russians feared it would spread through the southern armies. It was time to talk peace with the Ottomans before they forgot Chesme and Kagul. Then, in September 1771, terrible news arrived from Moscow.

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  The plague descended with ghastly intensity on the old
capital. In August, the toll was reaching 400 to 500 deaths a day. It was not long before order in the city evaporated. The nobles fled; officials panicked; the Governor abandoned his post; and Moscow became a surreal charnel house, scattered with rotting cadavers, stinking bonfires of flesh and rumours of miracles, curses and conspiracies. In the abandoned city, the streets were patrolled by desperate crowds of peasants and workers who increasingly placed their hopes in a miracle-working icon.39

  The last effective authority, Bishop Ambrosius, ordered the icon to be removed to reduce the risk of infection among the crowds who flocked to invoke its miraculous powers. The mob rioted and tore the Bishop to pieces. This was the same Bishop Ambrosius who had lent Potemkin the money to make the trip to St Petersburg. As Russia suffered the strain of the huge cost of war, the mob took control. There was a real danger that the plague might unleash something even worse – a peasant uprising in the countryside. The death toll kept rising.

  Grigory Orlov, restless since Catherine gave him no chance to prove himself, offered to travel to Moscow and sort out the situation. On 21 September 1771, he set off. By the time he arrived, 21,000 people were dying every month. Orlov displayed common sense, competence, energy and humanity. He worked tirelessly. Just showing his cherubic countenance and lofty figure around the city reassured the people. He burned 3,000 old houses where the infection could linger, disinfected 6,000 more, founded orphanages, reopened the public baths closed in the quarantine, and spent over 95,000 roubles distributing food and clothing. His Herculean efforts restored order in this Augean Stable. When he departed on 22 November, deathrates were falling – probably thanks to the cold, but the state was once again in control of Moscow. He reached Petersburg on 4 December to popular acclaim. Catherine built one of her arches in his honour in her Tsarskoe Selo park, which was dotted with monuments to her triumphs. She even struck a commemorative medal. It seemed that the Orlovs, that race of heroes, as Voltaire called them, were secure.40

  When the Turkish talks began the next year, Catherine gave Grigory Orlov the enormous responsibility of negotiating peace. Catherine saw him off in a costume she had given him, embroidered and diamond-studded on every seam. The sight of him inspired her again. ‘Count Orlov’, she gushed to Madame Bielke, ‘is the handsomest man of his generation.’41

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  As Orlov left St Petersburg, was Potemkin arriving there to help Catherine with her latest crisis? His precise activities during these months are mysterious. But, some time during the truce with Turks, he certainly visited St Petersburg again.

  Orlov’s departure for the south precipitated another plot against the Empress which also helped Potemkin. Between thirty and a hundred noncommissioned officers in the Preobrazhensky Guards mutinied. They believed Orlov was travelling to ‘the army to persuade them to swear allegiance to him’ and make himself ‘Prince of Moldavia and Emperor’. Their mission was Catherine’s ever present nightmare: to overthrow her and enthrone her son Paul as emperor. The plot was foiled but, as Paul approached his majority, Catherine was understandably nervous.42 The Swedish diplomat Ribbing wrote to his Court in July that Catherine had withdrawn to an estate in Finland, to decide what measures to take, accompanied by Kirill Razumovsky, Ivan Chernyshev, Lev Naryshkin – and Potemkin.43 The first names required no explanation – she had trusted them for almost twenty years. But the presence of Potemkin, still only thirty-one, is unexpected. It is his first mention as a close adviser of the Empress. Even if the Swede was mistaken, it still suggests that Potemkin was in Petersburg and already much closer to Catherine than anyone realized.

  There are more hints that he was already privately advising her, if not making love to her, much earlier than previously thought. When she summoned him in late 1773, she told him that he was ‘already [author’s italics] very close to our heart’.44 In February 1774, she told him that she regretted not starting their relationship ‘a year and a half ago’45 – in other words, in 1772. It was now she started to fall for him.

  Then, two months later, when Grigory Orlov opened talks with the Turks in Fokshany in faraway Moldavia, Potemkin, according to Samoilov,46 was at the talks, behaving in the manner for which he would later become famous. As Orlov negotiated, Potemkin supposedly spent the hours lazing on a sofa in his dressing gown, plunged in thought. This sounds just like him. It was natural that he and his troops would be in the area along with the rest of the army. Rumiantsev was there of course. Potemkin was presumably in his entourage, but he must have had Catherine’s blessing to lounge in the midst of an international peace conference, chaired by the suspicious Orlov. Did Catherine send Potemkin to watch Orlov? Why else would Orlov have tolerated him?

  The real story is why Orlov himself was there at all: he had neither diplomatic experience nor the temperament for the job. It emerged that Catherine had her own private reasons to remove him from St Petersburg, yet would she really have risked the peace conference merely to get him out of the capital? Admittedly he was assisted by the experienced Obreskov, the Russian Ambassador to the Sublime Porte, recently freed from the Seven Towers. But Orlov was scarcely suited to the tortuous horse-trading that the Turks regarded as good manners.

  Then he argued with Rumiantsev. Orlov wanted to start the war again; Rumiantsev, who knew that recruits were few, disease rampant and money short, did not. The Field-Marshal’s fastidious intelligence gave him the acuteness of an ice-pick. This must have riled the easygoing giant, who was far out of his depth. Finally, he lost his temper in mid-session and, to the astonishment of the Turkish plenipotentiaries, threatened to hang Rumiantsev himself. The Turks, who still regarded themselves as the receptacles of all that was elegant and civilized, no doubt shook their heads at these manifestations of Slavic barbarism. But the issues at risk there were extremely complicated and becoming more so by the day. Catherine was determined that the Turks should agree to the independence of the Crimea from Turkish sovereignty. The Crimea, suspended from the continent like a diamond from a belly dancer’s navel, dominated the Black Sea. The Turks claimed it as their ‘pure and immaculate virgin’ – the Sultan’s lake. Catherine’s proposal would remove Turkey from direct control of the northern coast of the Black Sea, except for its fortresses, and bring Russia one step closer to Peter the Great’s foiled dream of controlling its power and commerce.

  Meanwhile Prussia and Austria were becoming restless at the Russian successes: acquisitive, ruthless Frederick the Great was jealous that his Russian ally might gain too much Ottoman territory. Austria, hostile to Prussia and Russia, secretly negotiated a defensive treaty with the Turks. Prussia wanted some compensation for being a loyal ally to Russia; Austria wanted a reward for being a thoroughly disloyal one to Turkey. Whatever they said, Russia and Prussia both looked longingly at the helpless chaos of Poland. Austria’s Empress – Queen, Maria Theresa, balked at this thievery – yet, as Frederick the Great put it, ‘she wept, but she took’. Picturesque, feeble and self-destructive Poland was like an unlocked bank from which these imperial brigands could steal what they wished to pay for their expensive wars, satisfy their greed and ease their jealousy of each other. Austria, Prussia and Russia negotiated the First Partition of Poland, leaving Catherine free to enforce her demands on Turkey.

  Just when the Polish partition was all but agreed, Sweden, Turkey’s traditional ally, stepped in to spoil the party. Over the years, Russia had spent millions of roubles on bribes to ensure that Sweden remain a limited monarchy, split between the French and Russian parties. But in August 1772 its new young King, Gustavus III, restored absolutism in a coup. He encouraged the Turks to fight on. So, back in Fokshany, Orlov became tired of the Turks’ intransigence over his demand for Crimean independence. Whether it was the complexity of the diplomacy, the minutiae of Turkish etiquette or the presence of Potemkin, yawning in his dressing gown on the sofa, Orlov now delivered an ultimatum to the Turks that ruined the conference. The Turks walked out.
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  Orlov had other things on his mind: the Court was in crisis. Suddenly on 23 August, without awaiting orders, he abandoned the conference and headed for Petersburg as fast as his horses would carry him. Potemkin, if he still lay on the sofa as Orlov galloped away, would have been even deeper in thought than usual.

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  Grigory Orlov was stopped at the gates of St Petersburg at the express order of the Empress. He was ordered, for reasons of quarantine, to proceed to his nearby estate of Gatchina.

  Just a few days before, on 30 August, a good-looking ensign in the Horse-Guards, Alexander Vassilchikov, aged twenty-eight, was formally appointed adjutant-general to the Empress and moved into a Winter Palace apartment. Courtiers knew that they had been lovers for a month. After being introduced to Vassilchikov, at the behest of Nikita Panin, Catherine had watched him closely. At Tsarskoe Selo, when he escorted her carriage, she presented him with a gold snuff-box engraved ‘For the good bearing of the bodyguards’, an unusual reward for sentry duty. On 1 August, he was appointed gentleman of the bedchamber.47

  When Catherine heard that Grigory Orlov was on his way from Fokshany, she was alarmed but also furious, because his abandonment of the already tottering talks exposed her love life to the gaze of the cabinets of Europe. Indeed the foreign ambassadors were confused: they had presumed Orlov was Catherine’s partner for life. They were used to the balance between Panins and Orlovs, now allied to the Chernyshev brothers. No one knew the political effects of the arrival of Vassilchikov, except that the Orlovs were in decline and the Panins were in the ascendant.