Catherine the Great & Potemkin Read online

  In Smolensk: Anastasia Tikhonova, Researcher for the Smolensk Historical Museum, Elena Samolubova, and Vladimir Golitchev, Deputy Head of the Smolensk Regional Department of Education, responsible for Science. In Chizhova, the schoolteacher and expert on local folklore, Victor Zheludov and fellow staff at the school in Petrishchevo, the village nearest to Chizhova, with thanks for the Potemkin feast they kindly laid on.

  For the south Ukrainian journey, I thank Vitaly Sergeychik of the UKMAR shipping company and Misha Sherokov. In Odessa: Natalia Kotova, Professor Semyon J. Apartov, Professor of International Studies, Odessa State University. At the Odessa Regional Museum of History – Leonila A. Leschinskaya, Director, Vera V. Solodova, Vice-Director, and, especially, to the knowledgeable, charming master of the archives themselves, Adolf Nikolaevich Malikh, chief of the Felikieteriya section, who helped me so much. The Director of the Odessa Museum of Merchant Fleet of the Ukraine, Peter P. Klishevsky and the photographer there, Sergei D. Bereninich. In Ochakov: the Mayor, Yury M. Ishenko. In Kherson: Father Anatoly of St Catherine’s Church. At Dniepropetrovsk: Olga Pitsik, and the staffs of the museums in Nikolaev and Simpferopol; Anastas Victorevich of the Sabastopol Naval Museum. But above all, at the Alupka Palace, Anna Abramovna Galitchenko, author of Alupka A Palace inside a Park, proved a font of knowledge.

  In Rumania, thanks to Professor Razvan Magureanu, Professor of Electrical Engineering at the Polytechnic University of Bucharest, and Ioan Vorobet who drove us to Iasi, guarded us and made it possible to enter Moldova. In Iasi: Professor Fanica Ungureanu, authority on the Golia Monastery, and Alexander Ungureanu, Professor of Geography at Iasi University, without whose help I would never have found the site of Potemkin’s death. In Warsaw, Poland: Peter Martyn and Arkadiusz Bautz-Bentkowski and the AGAD staff. In Paris: the staff of AAE in the Quai d’Orsay. Karen Blank researched and translated German texts. Imanol Galfarsoro translated the Miranda diary from Spanish. In Telavi, Georgia: Levan Gachechiladze, who introduced me to Lida Potemkina.

  In Britain, I have many to thank for things great and small: my agent Georgina Capel, the Chairman of Orion, Anthony Cheetham, the Publisher of Weidenfeld & Nicolson, Ion Trewin, and Lord and Lady Weidenfeld. Thanks to John Gilkes for creating the maps. Great thanks are owed to Peter James, my legendary editor, for applying his wisdom to this book. The staff of the British Library, British Museum, the Public Records Office, the London Library, the Library of the School of Eastern European and Slavonic Studies, the Cornwall and Winchester Records Offices and the Antony Estate. I thank my father, Dr Stephen Sebag-Montefiore MD, for his diagnosis of Potemkin’s illnesses and singular psychology, and my mother, April Sebag-Montefiore, for her insights into Potemkin’s personal relationships. I have a special thank you for Galina Oleksiuk, my Russian teacher, without whose lessons this book could not have been written. I would also like to thank the following for their help or kind answers to my questions: Neal Ascherson, Vadim Benyatov, James Blount, Alain de Botton, Dr John Casey, the Honourable L. H. L. (Tim) Cohen, Professor Anthony Cross, Sir Edward Dashwood, Ingelborga Dapkunaite, Baron Robert Dimsdale, Professor Christopher Duffy, Lisa Fine, Princess Katya Golitsyn, Prince Emmanuel Golitsyn, David Henshaw, Professor Lindsey Hughes, Tania Illingworth, Anna Joukovskaya, Paul and Safinaz Jones, Dmitri Khankin, Professor Roderick E. McGrew, Giles MacDonogh, Noel Malcolm, the Earl of Malmesbury, Neil McKendrick the Master of Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge, Dr Philip Mansel, Sergei Alexandrovich Medvedev, Charles and Patty Palmer-Tomkinson, Dr Monro Price, Anna Reid, Kenneth Rose, the Honourable Olga Polizzi, Hywell Williams, Andre Zaluski. The credit for their gems of knowledge belong to them; the blame for any mistakes rest entirely on me.

  Last but not least, I must thank my wife, Santa, for enduring our ménage-à-trois with Prince Potemkin for so long.

  NOTES

  Dates are given in the Old Style Julian Calendar used in Russia which was eleven days earlier than the New Style Gregorian used in the West. In some cases both dates are given.

  Money: 1 rouble contained 100 kopecks. Approximately 4 roubles = £1 Sterling = 24 French Livres in the 1780s. At that time, an English gentleman could live on £300 a year, a Russian officer on 1,000 roubles.

  Distances and measurements: 1 verst equalled 0.663 miles or 1.06 km. 1 desyatina equalled 2.7 acres.

  Names and proper names: I have used the most recognizable form of most names, which means that absolute consistency is impossible in this area – so I apologize in advance to those offended by my decisions. The subject of this book is ‘Potemkin’, even though in Russian the pronunciation is closer to ‘Patiomkin’. I have used the Russian form of names except in cases where the name is already well known in its English form; for example, the Tsarevich Pavel Petrovich is usually called Grand Duke Paul; Semyon Romanovich Vorontsov is Simon Vorontsov; the Empress is Catherine, not Ekaterina. I usually spell Peter and other first names in the English form, instead of Piotr and so on. I have used the Russian feminized form of names such as Dashkova instead of Dashkov. In Polish names, such as Branicki, I have left the name in its more polonized form, pronounced ‘Branitsky’. Thus, in the feminine, I have used the Russian for Skavronskaya but the Polish for Branicka. Once someone is known by a suffix or title, I try to use it, so that A. G. Orlov is Orlov-Chesmensky once he had received this surname.

  PREFACE TO THE VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION

  For two centuries Catherine the Great and Potemkin were relegated to the somewhat shady, lascivious and romantic alleyways of history, mocked as power-mad, sex-mad or farcically inept. More recently, scholars have rehabilitated them as statesmen, and now again, in the twenty-first century, with their conquests catching the interest of President Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin, they find themselves at the centre of the crossroads where history meets current events.

  Without cameras or eye-witnesses, it is impossible for historians to know what really happened behind the doors of bedrooms and cabinet rooms—unless the protagonists wrote frank letters. Catherine and Potemkin wrote thousands of such letters on love and power; we know how they spoke and thought, and the exceptional intensity of their passion. We know more about them than we do about many politicians today—even in the age of Facebook and Wikileaks. ‘Can one love anybody else after having known you?’ wrote Catherine. ‘There’s not a man in the world that equals you…Oh Monsieur Potemkin! What trick have you played to unbalance a mind that was once one of the best in Europe?’ Their outrageously libertine lifestyle and exuberant political triumphs certainly titillated Western critics of Russian success and excess—’This is Potemkin,’ wrote Byron, ‘a great thing in days when homicide and harlotry made great’—while the British newspapers propagated stories of Catherine’s nymphomania and Potemkin’s false villages. But those who really knew Catherine and Potemkin regarded them as utterly singular, brilliant, ambitious and complementary in their talents: ‘No wonder they love each other,’ wrote one contemporary, ‘they’re exactly the same.’ Catherine was probably the greatest female leader of modern times, while the Prince de Ligne thought Potemkin ‘the most extraordinary man I ever met…Genius, genius and more genius.’ Together, they saw themselves as patriotic statesmen serving Russia—crown, nation and state. They were supreme politicians and thoughtful visionaries who trusted and admired each other because they were also personal partners.

  Yet they were the ultimate realists, too. Potemkin defined the politician’s art thus: ‘to improve on events.’ And they did more than that. Their mission was to expand the empire into the southern regions of Ukraine they dubbed ‘New Russia’. They annexed swathes of this territory (1774, 1775 and 1791) and Crimea (1783), where they founded Russia’s Black Sea navy, the new naval base Sebastopol, and many new cities including the port of Odessa, as well as advancing into Georgia in the Caucasus (1783). The colossal achievements of Catherine and Potemkin in the south are equivalent to those of Peter of Great in the north. They altered the balance of power in Europe,
making Russia a power with new Near Eastern and Mediterranean interests. Their colonization of New Russia and annexation of Crimea changed Russia’s political centre of gravity and her vision of herself as imperial power. It is a perspective that survived the fall of the Romanov dynasty.

  After the mayhem of 1917 and the civil war, Lenin and Stalin shrewdly and brutally managed to keep together most of the Romanovs’ empire (losing only Poland, Finland and—temporarily—the Baltics) by creating the façade of a voluntary Soviet Union of fifteen republics. Stalin had little time for Catherine and Potemkin’s louche extravagance, preferring severe, macho role models such as Peter the Great, but he admired them as politicians: ‘the genius of Catherine,’ he said, ‘lay in her choice of Prince Potemkin…to govern the state.’ However, when the USSR collapsed in 1991, Russia lost all the republics including the most important, Ukraine.

  When this book was published in 2000, just as that dynamic and ruthless ex-KGB officer, Vladimir Putin, was elected president, I was surprised to find the apparatchiks of his new regime were keen to read and discuss it—even to the extent of organising surreal secret meetings with this English historian to discuss statesmen dead for two hundred years. Putin and his henchmen regarded the fall of the USSR and loss of empire as one of the greatest catastrophes of the twentieth century, and the Kremlin looked to Catherine and Potemkin as unlikely heroes, regarding their achievements in the Caucasus, Crimea and Ukraine as talismanic to Russia’s status as a great power.

  Catherine and Potemkin had been long neglected by Soviet history as too decadent, aristocratic and feminine. When I started to research this book in Russian archives in the mid-1990s, some of their papers had not even been studied since the reign of Nicholas II. Now they are once again in fashion, inspirations to a new regime that combines imperial nostalgia with nationalistic ambition: the early twenty-first-century Kremlin fused the gilded majesty of the Romanov Empire with the grim glory of a Stalinist superpower into a peculiar modern hybrid, a new autocracy embellished with supposedly democratic institutions and the trappings of modernity in the Internet age.

  The new leaders, often trained in the elite KGB, have no interest in Catherine and Potemkin’s culture, enlightenment and humanity, which have little in common with their intolerant authoritarianism. But they are interested in their autocratic and imperial legacy, particularly in the south. The eighteenth-century couple and the new masters of the Kremlin share a belief in the prestige and discipline of the state; the essential facility of autocracy to govern unruly Russia; a vision of the exceptionalist mission of Russian civilisation; the idea that Russia cannot be a great power without Ukraine and Crimea—and a glorious role in the world, relayed in spectacular television images to the Russian people. Pushkin understood what Potemkin had achieved for Catherine and Russia: ‘The glory of a name dear to his empress and his motherland…touched by the hand of history, he won us the Black Sea.’ Potemkin’s conquests, new cities and fleet are part of what makes this couple important two hundred years after their deaths.

  In 2008, President Putin went to war against Georgia to reassert Russian hegemony there. In February 2014, he challenged American and European Union advances into independent Ukraine using unmarked Russian military units, the mysterious ‘green men’, to occupy and successfully annex Crimea—Russia’s first territorial recovery since the disastrous disintegration of the Soviet Union. Crimea had been part of the Russian Federation in Soviet times until Stalin, just before his death, decided to award it to Ukraine on an imperial whim: his successors transferred it in 1954. But it retained its military, imperial and mystical significance to Russia.

  This lush peninsula had been the place where Vladimir the Great, Grand Prince of Kiev, had converted to Christianity in 988, an event cited by Potemkin in his letter to Catherine urging the immediate annexation of Crimea in 1783. In 2014, Putin declared ‘Crimea is as sacred to Russia as Jerusalem’s Temple Mount is to Judaism and Islam.’

  After this success, Moscow launched a secret war to undermine independent Ukraine and detach the eastern part of the country: ‘New Russia’ was widely used to describe it, echoing Catherine and Potemkin. This opportunistic war—costing thousands of innocent lives, fought secretly by unmarked Russian army units and publically by nationalistic freebooters—was probably launched to confirm and stimulate the archaic if popular conviction that a Russia that dominates Ukraine is still a great Russia.

  In 2015, Russia reasserted its traditional interests in the Middle East, when Putin spectacularly intervened in the vicious and complex Syrian civil war to back a long-term Soviet client regime, the Assad dynasty, with military force, a policy that echoed the path first tentatively followed by Catherine in the Ottoman provinces of Syria (when she backed Arab strongmen against the sultan in Constantinople and even occupied Beirut) and pursued more powerfully by Emperor Nicholas I and then the Soviets during the Cold War. But in a one-man regime, these were the policies of Vladimir Putin and their outcome will ultimately depend on his survival, the way he leaves power and the nature of his successors.

  Catherine and Potemkin remain perhaps the most enlightened and humane rulers Russia has ever enjoyed—though the bar is not set particularly high. Brilliant and imaginative, tolerant and magnanimous, passionate and eccentric, extravagant and epicurean, industrious and ambitious, they were very different characters from today’s rulers, the grim children of the Soviet Union. Yet, strangely, in the twenty-first century, they are more relevant—and present—than ever.

  Simon Sebag Montefiore

  April 2016

  PROLOGUE

  DEATH ON THE STEPPES

  ‘Prince of Princes’

  Jeremy Bentham on Prince Potemkin

  Whose bed – the earth: whose roof – the azure

  Whose halls the wilderness round?

  Are you not fame and pleasure’s offspring

  Oh splendid prince of Crimea?

  Have you not from the heights of honors

  Been suddenly midst empty steppes downed?

  Gavrili Derzhavin, The Waterfall

  Shortly before noon on 5 October 1791, the slow cavalcade of carriages, attended by liveried footmen and a squadron of Cossacks in the uniform of the Black Sea Host, stopped halfway down a dirt track on a desolate hillside in the midst of the Bessarabian steppe. It was a strange place for the procession of a great man to rest: there was no tavern in sight, not even a peasant’s hovel. The big sleeping carriage, pulled by eight horses, halted first. The others – there were probably four in all – slowed down and stopped alongside the first on the grass as the footmen and cavalry escort ran to see what was happening. The passengers threw open their carriage doors. When they heard the despair in their master’s voice, they hurried towards his carriage.

  ‘That’s enough!’ said Prince Potemkin. ‘That’s enough! There is no point in going on now.’ Inside the sleeping carriage, there were three harassed doctors and a slim countess with high cheekbones and auburn hair, all crowded round the Prince. He was sweating and groaning. The doctors summoned the Cossacks to move their massive patient. ‘Take me out of the carriage…’ Potemkin ordered. Everyone jumped when he commanded, and he had commanded virtually everything in Russia for a long time. Cossacks and generals gathered round the open door and slowly, gently began to bear out the stricken giant.

  The Countess accompanied him out of the carriage, holding his hand, dabbing his hot brow as tears streamed down her face with its small retroussé nose and full mouth. A couple of Moldavian peasants who tended cattle on the nearby steppe ambled over to watch. His bare feet came first, then his legs and his half-open dressing gown – though this vision in itself was not unusual. Potemkin notoriously greeted empresses and ambassadors in bare feet and open dressing gowns. But now it was different. He still had the leonine Slavic handsomeness, the thick head of hair, once regarded as the finest in the Empire, and the sensual Grec
ian profile that had won him the nickname ‘Alcibiades’1 as a young man. However, his hair was now flecked with grey and hung over his feverish forehead. He was still gigantic in stature and breadth. Everything about him was exaggerated, colossal and original, but his life of reckless indulgence and relentless ambition had bloated his body and aged his face. Like a Cyclops he had only one eye; the other was blind and damaged, giving him the appearance of a pirate. His chest was broad and hairy. Always a force of nature, he now resembled nothing so much as a magnificent animal reduced to this twitching, shivering pile of flesh.

  The apparition on this wild steppe was His Most Serene Highness Prince of the Holy Roman Empire, Grigory Alexandrovich Potemkin, probably husband of the Empress of Russia, Catherine the Great, and certainly the love of her life, the best friend of the woman, the co-ruler of her Empire and the partner in her dreams. He was Prince of Taurida, Field-Marshal, Commander-in-Chief of the Russian Army, Grand Hetman of the Black Sea and Ekaterinoslav Cossacks, Grand Admiral of the Black Sea and Caspian Fleets, President of the College of War, viceroy of the south, and possibly the next King of Poland, or of some other principality of his own making.

  The Prince, or Serenissimus, as he was known across the Russian Empire, had ruled with Catherine II for nearly two decades. They had known each other for thirty years and had shared each other’s lives for almost twenty. Beyond that, the Prince defied, and still defies, all categorization. Catherine noticed him as a witty young man and summoned him to be her lover at a time of crisis. When their affair ended, he remained her friend, partner and minister and became her co-Tsar. She always feared, respected and loved him – but their relationship was stormy. She called him her ‘Colossus’, and her ‘tiger’, her ‘idol’, ‘hero’, the ‘greatest eccentric’.2 This was the ‘genius’3 who hugely increased her Empire, created Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, conquered the Crimea, won the Second Turkish War and founded famed cities such as Sebastopol and Odessa. Russia had not possessed an imperial statesman of such success in both dreams and deeds since Peter the Great.