Catherine the Great & Potemkin Read online

  His enemies said the Prince planned to build a cathedral in the middle of this heretofore empty steppe larger than St Peter’s in Rome, like the African dictator of a penniless state building the biggest cathedral in the world in the middle of the jungle. Ever since, historians, even Potemkin’s only modern biographer George Soloveytchik, have repeated this embarrassing ambition as a sign of the Prince’s overweening delusions of grandeur.69 However, Potemkin may have mentioned St Peter’s but he never actually proposed building it: in his letter to Catherine, he wrote, ‘I imagine here an excellent cathedral, a kind of imitation of St Paul’s-outside-the-walls-of-Rome, devoted to the Transfiguration of God, as a sign of the transformation of this land by your care, from a barren steppe to an ample garden, and from the wilderness of animals to a home, welcoming people from all lands.’70 San Paolo-fuorile-mura was admittedly an ambitious undertaking, but not quite as absurd as St Peter’s. It is unlikely Catherine would ever have signed off on a copy of St Peter’s nor assigned the huge tranches of two and three million roubles to the development of the south if Potemkin’s ideas were so ludicrous. Somehow, St Peter’s was substituted.

  The only part of the city that existed from the beginning was the University of Ekaterinoslav, with its own musical conservatoire.71 He immediately moved the Greek gymnasium, founded on his Ozerki estate as part of the Greek Project, to his New Athens, saying he had saved enough to rebuild the school there.72 The conservatoire was closest to his lyrical heart. ‘It’s the first time’, sneered Cobenzl to Joseph in November 1786, ‘someone has decided to establish a corps de musique in a town before it’s even been built.’73 Potemkin hired Giuseppe Sarti, his personal composer–conductor, as the first head of the conservatoire. It was not just Sarti: the Prince really was hiring musical staff in Italy before a city was constructed. ‘Enclosed, I have the honour of presenting you, Monseigneur, the bill of 2800 Roubles for the order of Your Highness,’ wrote a certain Castelli from Milan on 21 March 1787, ‘to Monsieur Joseph Canta who has passed them to the four Professors of Music…They plan to leave for Russia on the 26th…’.74 The destiny of the four Milanese professors is unknown.

  In 1786, he ordered local Governor Ivan Sinelnikov to enrol two painters, Neretin and Bukharov, as professors of art at the university, with salaries of 150 roubles. Even in the midst of the war in January 1791, he ordered Ekaterinoslav’s Governor to employ a Frenchman named de Guienne as ‘historian at the Academy’ on a salary of 500 roubles. As Potemkin told Sinelnikov, the public schools had to be improved to provide the university with good students. Overall, 300,000 roubles was assigned to the educational establishments alone.75 This was derided. Yet it is hard to fault Potemkin’s priorities when he paid as much attention to teachers as to battleships.

  All this was undoubtedly eccentric, but an ability to turn his ideas into reality was at the heart of Potemkin’s genius. Much that seemed ridiculous after his death seemed possible during his life: the scale on which he created not just cities but the Black Sea Fleet sounded unlikely but he alone made it happen. So the university and city could have been built – but only in his lifetime. His vision was a noble one, far wider than just the conservatoire: it was to be an international Orthodox college where Potemkin believed ‘young people’ from Poland, Greece, Wallachia and Moldavia could study.76 As ever with the Prince, his choice of students was closely connected to his aims for the Empire and for himself. He was always trying to train better sailors for his ships. In 1787, after Catherine’s visit, he united all the naval academies in the region and Petersburg and moved them to Ekaterinoslav. This was to be the academy of the Greek Project, the school for Potemkin’s kingdoms.77

  * * *

  —

  The work did not begin until mid-1787, then was delayed by the war so that little of it was built. But not as little as everyone thinks. In 1790, Starov arrived in the south, and laid new plans for the whole city, especially its cathedral and the Prince’s Palace, all approved by Potemkin, on 15 February 1790. The professors’ residences and the administrative buildings for the university were finished. By 1792, there were 546 state buildings and just 2,500 inhabitants.78 Its Governor, Vasily Kahovsky, reported to the Empress after the Prince’s death that the town was laid out and continuing. Without its master, would it continue?79 By 1815, a travelling official reported that it was ‘more like some Dutch colony than a provincial administrative centre’.80 Yet something of his Athens remains.

  * * *

  —

  Ekaterinoslav never became a southern Petersburg; its university was never the Oxford of the steppes. The gap between hope and reality made this Potemkin’s biggest failure and it has been used to discredit much else that was done well. Yet none of the historians of the last two centuries had visited Ekaterinoslav, which, like Sebastopol, was a closed city in Soviet times. When one looks more closely at the city, now called Dniepropetrovsk, it becomes clear its position was admirably chosen on the high and green bank of a bend of the Dnieper, where the great river is almost a mile wide. Potemkin’s main Catherine Street became the modern Karl Marx Prospekt, still called ‘the longest, widest, most elegant avenue in all the Russians’ by locals. (William Hastie, the Scottish architect, expanded on this grid in his 1816 city plan.)81

  In the middle of the city stands an eighteenth-century church, now newly alive with Orthodox worshippers. Its name – Church of the Transformation – is the one Potemkin suggested in 1784. It is a grand and imposing edifice, completely in proportion to the size of its city. It has a high spire, Classical pillars and golden cupola, based on Starov’s original plans. Begun in 1788 during the war, completed long after Potemkin’s death, in 1837, there stands the Prince’s noble cathedral in the midst of the city that was supposed never to have been built.82 Not far from the church is a hideous yellow triumphal arch of Soviet design that leads to Potemkin Park, which still contains the massive Potemkin Palace.83 It was to be another eighty years after Potemkin’s death before musical conservatoires were opened in St Petersburg and Moscow. But Ekaterinoslav was to flourish most under Soviet planning when it became a toiling industrial centre – as Potemkin had wanted.*5

  * * *

  —

  Potemkin’s cities advanced as he gained territory. The last cities he sponsored were made possible by the conquests of the Second Turkish War – Nikolaev, by the fall of the fortress of Ochakov, and Odessa, by the push round the Black Sea.

  On 27 August 1789, the Prince scrawled out the order to found Nikolaev, named after St Nikolai, the saint of seafarers on whose day Potemkin finally stormed Ochakov. Built on a high, cool and breezy spot where the Ingul river meets the Bug about twenty miles upriver from Kherson and fifty from the Black Sea, Nikolaev was the best planned and most successful of his cities (except Odessa).

  It was built by Faleev on Potemkin’s precise orders, sweeping in vision, precise in detail. In a twenty-one point memorandum, he ordered Faleev to build a monastery, move naval headquarters from Kherson to Nikolaev, construct a military school for 300, fund a church from the income of local taverns, recast the broken bell of the Mejigorsky Convent, adding copper to it, cultivate the land ‘according to the English method as practised by three British-educated assistants of Professor Livanov’, build hospitals and resthomes for invalids, create a free port, cover all fountains with marble, build a Turkish bath and an admiralty – and then establish a town council and a police force.

  Faleev amazingly was able to parry these thrusts of energy one by one. He answered Potemkin’s specific orders, ‘Your Highness ordered me to’ and then reported that virtually all had been done – and more, from settling Old Believer priests to sowing kitchen gardens. Shipyards were built first. Peasants, soldiers and Turkish prisoners built the city: 2,500 were working there during 1789. Faleev evidently worked them too hard because Serenissimus ordered their protection and daily rations of hot wine. There is a contemporary print in the Nikolaev
Museum showing the soldiers and Turkish prisoners-of-war working on foot, supervised by mounted Russian officers. Another shows oxen dragging logs to build the city.

  By October, Faleev could tell the Prince that the landing stage was finished and that the earthmoving by the conscripts and Turks would be finished within a month. There were already nine stone and five wooden barracks. In 1791, the main shipyards were moved from Kherson to Nikolaev.84 Here we see how Potemkin worked. There is no trace of the layabout, nor of the clown who performed for Westerners, nor of the grandiose autocrat who paid no attention to detail. Potemkin pushed Faleev. ‘Work quickly,’ he wrote about one battleship he needed and ‘Strain all your forces.’ Next, he thanked him for the watermelons he had sent but added, ‘You cannot imagine how my honour and the future of Nikolaev shipyard depends on this ship.’85 The first frigate from his new city was launched before his death – and his own palace was almost complete.

  Four years later, the visiting Maria Guthrie acclaimed its 10,000 inhabitants, ‘remarkably long, broad, straight streets’ and ‘handsome public buildings’. The city’s position even today is ideal: it is well laid out and planned, though few of Potemkin’s buildings survive. Its shipyards still work where they were built by him 200 years ago.86

  * * *

  —

  Odessa was conquered by Potemkin, who ordered a town and fortress to be built there – though it was neither named nor started until after his death. When the Prince took the Ottoman fort of Hadjibey in 1789, he recognized that it was an outstanding and strategic site, ordered the old castle to be blown up and personally chose the site of the port and settlement. Work was to start immediately.

  This was being done when he died, but the town was formally founded three years later by his protégé José (Osip) de Ribas, the Spanish adventurer from Naples who had helped Orlov-Chesmensky kidnap ‘Princess Tarakanova’. ‘General (later Admiral) de Ribas was accomplished in mind, artifice and talent, but no saint,’ according to Langeron. His portrait by Lampi shows his foxy, ruthless and subtle face. In 1776, he married the illegitimate daughter of Catherine’s friend and artistic supremo Ivan Betskoi, who had had an affair with the Empress’s mother. They became one of the most politically adept couples in Petersburg. Henceforth, wherever the Prince was, Ribas was never far away. Always vigorous and competent, whether building Potemkin’s ships, commanding his fleets or procuring his mistresses, Ribas joined Popov and Faleev as Potemkin’s three superlative men of action.*6

  Catherine named the port after Odessos – the Ancient Greek town that was believed to be nearby – but she feminized it to Odessa. It remains one of the jewels of Potemkin’s legacy.87

  * * *

  —

  ‘I report that the first ship to be launched will be called the Glory of Catherine – Ekaterinoslav,’ wrote Potemkin over-enthusiastically to his Empress. ‘Please allow me to give it this name.’ The name ‘Ekaterinoslav’ had become an obsession. Cities, ships and regiments groaned under its grandeur. This concerned the prudent Empress: ‘Please don’t give too grandiose names to the ships, lest such loud names become a burden to them…Do what you like with the names but free the reins because it’s better to be than to seem.’88 But Potemkin was not going to change Catherine’s Glory even to protect the glory of Catherine at her own behest. So he ignored her request and, in September, proudly announced the launch from his Kherson shipyards of the sixty-six-gun ship-of-the-line named Catherine’s Glory.89 This is a most characteristic exchange.*7

  The Prince was right to be excited because ships-of-the-line, those hulking floating fortresses with their rows of over forty or fifty guns, the same as some entire armies, were the eighteenth century’s most prestigious weapons – the equivalent of aircraft carriers. (Catherine granted Potemkin the initial 2.4 million roubles to finance this on 26 June 1786.) The construction of a whole fleet of them has been compared by a modern historian to the cost and effort of a space programme. However, Potemkin’s critics claim that the ships were rotten, if they were built at all. This was nonsense. Pole Carew carefully examined the shipbuilding in progress. There were three ships-of-the-line of sixty-six guns in an ‘advanced state’ while frigates of thirty and forty guns had already been launched. Four more keels were laid. The state was not the only shipbuilder there – Faleev was building his merchantmen too. Down at Gluboka, thirty-five versts towards the sea, there were already seven more frigates of between twenty-four and thirty-two guns. When Miranda, who had no European prejudices and broad military experience, visited five years later, he reported that neither the timber nor the design of the ships could be bettered and considered the workmanship of a better standard than those of either Spanish or French vessels. They were built, he said, offering the highest praise one could give a ship in those days, ‘in the English manner’.90

  This showed that he knew what he was talking about, for the German, French and Russian critics of Potemkin’s ships did not realize that his timber came from the same places as timber for English warships. Furthermore, they were built by sailors and engineers trained in England such as Potemkin’s admiral Nikolai Mordvinov (who married an English girl) and the engineer Korsakov. Indeed, by 1786, Kherson had an English ambience. ‘Mordvinov and Korsakov both are much more like Englishmen than any foreigners I ever met,’ decided that ardent traveller Lady Craven.91 Yet Kaiser Joseph, who was no expert on naval matters, claimed the ships were ‘built of green timber, worm eaten’.92

  By 1787, the Prince had created a formidable fleet that the British Ambassador put at twenty-seven battleships. If one counts ships-of-the-line as having over forty guns, he had twenty-four of them, built in nine years, starting at Kherson. Later Sebastopol’s perfect harbour became the naval base of Potemkin’s fleet and Nikolaev its main shipyard. This, together with the thirty-seven ships-of-the-line of the Baltic Fleet, instantly placed Russian seapower almost equal to Spain, just behind France – though far behind the 174 ships-of-the-line of Britain, the world’s only naval superpower.

  Potemkin is the father of the Black Sea Fleet, just as Peter the Great created the Baltic one. The Prince was proudest of his fleet. It was his special ‘child’ and he poses in Lampi’s rare portrait in his white uniform as Grand Admiral of the Black Sea and Caspian Fleets with the Euxine (Black) Sea behind him. Catherine knew it was his creation. ‘It might seem an exaggeration,’ a British envoy recorded Serenissimus saying, at the end of his life, ‘but he could, almost literally, say that every plank, used in building the fleet, was carried on his shoulders.’93

  * * *

  —

  His other Herculean effort was to attract the ordinary folk to populate these vast empty territories. The settlement of colonists and ex-soldiers on the frontiers was an old Russian practice but Potemkin’s campaign of recruitment, in which Catherine issued manifestos offering all manner of incentives to settlers – no taxes for ten years, free cattle or farming equipment, spirits or brewery franchises – was astonishing in its imagination, scale and success. Hundreds of thousands were moved, housed, and settled, and received welfare gifts of ploughs, money and oxen. Frederick the Great had set the standard of colonization during the retablissement of his war-torn territories by tolerating all sects, so that, by the time of his death, 20 per cent of Prussians were immigrants. The Prince had a modern understanding of the power of public-relations. He advertised in foreign newspapers and created a network of recruiting agents across Europe. ‘The foreign newspapers’, he explained to Catherine, ‘are full of praises for the new settlements set up in New Russia and Azov.’ The public would read about the privileges granted to the Armenian and Greek settlers and ‘realize their full value’. He also recommended the modern idea of using Russian embassies to help recruitment. Potemkin had been an enthusiastic colonist since coming to power. Even in the mid-1770s, he was recruiting immigrants for his new settlements on the Mozdok Line of the north Caucasus.94 His ideal settler
s would plant, plough, trade and manufacture in peacetime, and, when war came, ride out against the Turks.95

  Potemkin’s first settlers were the Albanians, from Orlov-Chesmensky’s Mediterranean fleet of 1769, and the Crimean Christians. The former initially settled in Yenikale, the latter in their own towns like Mariupol. The Albanians were soldier–farmers. Potemkin founded schools and hospitals as well as towns for these immigrants. Once the Crimea was annexed, Potemkin formed the Albanians into regiments and settled them at Balaklava. The Prince specifically designated Mariupol for the Crimean Greeks. As with all his towns, he supervised its development, adding to it throughout his career. By 1781 the Azov Governor reported that much of it was built. There were four churches, the Greeks had their own court and it grew into a prosperous Greek trading town. Later Potemkin founded Nachkichevan, on the lower Don near Azov, and Gregoripol (named after himself, of course), on the Dniester, for the Armenians.96

  Serenissimus racked his brains to find productive citizens inside the Empire, attracting noblemen and their serfs,97 retired and wounded soldiers, Old Believers*8 or raskolniki,98 Cossacks and, naturally, women to make homes for them. The girls were despatched southwards like the mail order brides of Midwestern settlers in nineteenth century America.99 Typically, Potemkin also targeted impoverished village priests.100 Outside the Empire, he offered amnesty to exiles, such as fugitive serfs,101 raskolniki, and Cossacks who had fled to Poland or Turkey. Families, villages and whole towns of people moved, or returned, to settle in his provinces. It is estimated that, by 1782, he had doubled the population of New Russia and Azov.102