Catherine the Great & Potemkin Read online

  Skip Notes

  *1 Suvorov, according to the histories, was supposed to have complained to Catherine that jealous Potemkin was excluding him from senior commands. The truth was the opposite.

  *2 Her courtiers were old too: Ivan Chernyshev left such a disgusting stench in the Empress’s apartments that the floor had to be doused in lavender water every time he left.

  *3 Akkerman’s massive fortress still stands.

  *4 ’To his Highness Monseigneur Prince Potemkin: Representation of Ahmet Pasha Huhafiz of Bender. In rendering with deep respect the honours due to Your Highness, very generous, very firm, very gracious, ornamented of an elevated genius to devise and execute very great enterprises, whose authority is accompanied by the most dazzling dignity, Principal Minister, acclaimed with the very highest precedence and first representative of Her Imperial Highness, the Padishah of Russia, we represent…the pity for children and women brings us to accept…the proposition.’

  *5 ‘We’ve taken nine launches, Without losing a boy, And Bender with three Pashas, Without losing a cat.’

  29

  THE DELICIOUS AND THE CRUEL: SARDANAPALUS

  Now dreaming I a Sultan am

  I terrify the world by glances;

  Gavrila Derzhavin, ‘Ode to Princess Felitsa’

  The despotism of vice

  The weakness and the wickedness of luxury

  The negligence – the apathy – the evils

  Of sensual sloth produce ten thousand tyrants.

  Lord Byron, Sardanapalus

  ‘Be very careful with the Prince,’ whispered Princess Ekaterina Dolgorukaya to her friend Countess Varvara Golovina when she arrived at the court of Serenissimus in Jassy, the capital of Moldavia. ‘He is like a Sovereign here.’1 Potemkin’s chosen capital, Jassy (now Iaşi in Rumania), could have been made for him. It was surrounded by three empires – Ottoman, Russian and Habsburg – prayed in three religions – Moslem, Orthodox and Jewish – and spoke three languages – Greek, Turkish and French. Its marketplaces, dominated by Jews, Greeks and Italians, offered ‘all the merchandise of the Orient in abundance’.2 Its sophistication, which consoled Ligne in 1788 for the miseries of Ochakov, had ‘enough of the oriental to have the piquant of Asia and enough civilization to add to it some European graces’.3

  The rulers, the Hospodars or Princes, of Wallachia and Moldavia, the two Danubian Principalities, were Greeks from the Phanar District of Constantinople and some of them were descended from Byzantine emperors. These wealthy Phanariots bought their temporary thrones from the Ottoman Sultan. Their Orthodox–Islamic, Byzantine–Ottoman coronations in Istanbul were perhaps the only example of rulers crowned in a country which they did not rule.4 Once in Jassy or Bucharest, the hydrid Greek-Turkish Hospodars taxed their temporary realms to fill their coffers to cover the exorbitant price they had paid the Sultan for their thrones: ‘a prince leaves Constantinople with three million piastres of debt and after four years…returns with six million’.5 They lived like magnificent parodies of Ottoman–Byzantine emperors, surrounded by Phanariot courtiers – their prime minister was called the Grand Postelnik, their police chief the Grand Spatar and their chief justice the Grand Hetman. Often they might rule in both places, or the same one, several times.

  The aristocracy, the boyars, were Rumanians but were overlaid with rich Phanariot dynasties, some of whom were now based in Jassy, where they built their fine neo-Classical palaces. These Greek boyars, who looked like ‘monkeys on a horse covered in rubies’, lived in Turkish robes and pantaloons, grew their beards, shaved their heads and sported bonnets encircled with fur and rings of pearls. They waved flywhisks, nibbled sherbet and read Voltaire. Their women languished on divans, wearing diamond-infested turbans and short transparent petticoats, their necks and arms covered in gauze with pearls and coins sewn into them. They dangled fan-like chaplets made of diamonds, pearls, coral, lapis lazuli and rare wood. Connoisseurs of femininity like Ligne were fascinated by these ‘pretty, tender – and apathetic’ princesses whose only flaw was the protuberant belly regarded as a sign of beauty. Ligne claimed that their morals made the Paris of Les Liaisons Dangereuses appear monastic and that the Hospodar let his friends ‘visit’ the women in his wife’s household – but only after a medical check. ‘People took each other and left each other, there was neither jealousy nor bad temper.’6

  It was not merely the cosmopolitanism and luxury that suited Potemkin, but also the politics. The throne of Moldavia was highly lucrative but extremely dangerous: heads were lost as quickly as fortunes were gained. Ligne overheard the ladies at court sighing, ‘here my father was massacred by order of the Porte and here my sister by order of the Hospodar’. This was the battleground of both the Russo-Turkish wars, which placed the Hospodars in an impossible position. They trod a political tightrope between Orthodox God and Moslem Sultan. They had to play a complicated double game. The First Russo-Turkish War had won Russia rights to appoint consuls in these Principalities. One of the major causes of the outbreak of war in 1787 was the Ottoman overthrow of the Moldavian Hospodar, Alexander Mavrocordato, who was given sanctuary in Russia and sent Potemkin books and requests for money, while writing that ‘philosophy alone sustains me’. The impermanence of these Hospodars, their Greek race and the Orthodoxy of the people attracted Potemkin.7

  * * *

  —

  Serenissimus now ruled from Jassy as if he had, at last, found his kingdom. Dacia had been destined for him since the Greek Project of 1782. The rumours of Potemkin’s potential crowns became ever more colourful – a Livonian duchy, a Greek kingdom of Morea and even a most Potemkinian project to buy two Italian islands, Lampedusa and Linosa, from the Kingdom of Naples and found an order of knighthood – but a variation on Dacia was much more likely.8 Potemkin ‘regarded Moldavia as a domain which belonged to him’.9

  While the Hospodars of Moldavia and Wallachia corresponded with Potemkin from the Turkish camp, begging for peace,10 the Prince himself adopted their resplendence, while ruling through a Divan of boyars, under his dynamic Georgian negotiator11 Sergei Lazhkarev.*1 The Turks and Westerners knew that Potemkin wanted Moldavia; he coaxed and charmed the boyars, who12 themselves were almost offering him the throne.13 Their letters at this time thanked him for delivering them ‘from the tyranny of the Turks. We beg Your Highness not to lose from your vigilant vision the little interests of our country which will always have Your Highness as Liberator.’ Prince Cantacuzino, scion of Byzantine emperors, heralded this ‘epoch of felicity – we dare to run to the wise lights of Your Highness, hero of the century’.14

  Serenissimus now took the modern step of becoming a press baron. He created, edited and published his own newspaper called Le Courrier de Moldavie. Printed by his own movable printing press, Le Courrier was a tabloid emblazoned with the Moldavian crest that reported international and local news. The articles were moderately liberal, rabidly against the French Revolution and gently supportive of an independent Rumanian realm under Potemkin.15 Some believed he even planned to create a Moldavian army by detaching crack Russian regiments.16 His nephew General Samoilov, who was often with him at this time, states that he would only ever make peace if Moldavia – Dacia*2 – was granted independence.17

  * * *

  —

  The Prince was never one to allow war, winter or the small matter of a new kingdom to interfere with his pleasures. ‘Mister monk, no monkhood,’ Catherine teased him in an imperial understatement.18 He resided in the palaces of either Princes Cantacuzino or Ghika and spent hot days in Czerdak in the countryside nearby.’*3 He was joined by ten mechanics from Tula, twelve carriages of books, twenty jewellers, twenty-three female carpet-makers, 100 embroiderers,19 a mime troupe, his 200 hornplayers (to play Sarti’s ‘Te Deum’ to Ochakov, accompanied by the firing of cannons, an idea borrowed by Tchaikovsky for his 1812 Overture),
a 300-voice choir, a corps de ballet,20 gardener Gould, architect Starov,21 nephews, nieces and his chancellor Popov.

  Only his English cooks refused to go,22 so he had to make do with English gardens and French meals – probably a much better idea anyway. But he did receive hampers23 of English delicacies as a consolation. One such consignment – the bill is in his archives – contained smoked salmon, dried salmon, marinated salmon, Dutch herrings, Livonian anchovies, smoked souls, lampreys, eels, two barrels of apples, two bottles of mussels, two bottles of tinto, two bottles of Lacrima Christi, two bottles of champagne and six of Hermiatate, three bottles of red burgundy, three of white burgundy, three bottles of Jamaican rum – and more.

  ‘Parties, balls, theatres, ballets were organized ceaselessly.’ When the Prince heard that an officer 700 versts away played the violin well, he sent a courier for the fiddler; when he arrived, he listened with pleasure, gave him a gift and sent him straight back again.24 This reflected Potemkin’s pre-Napoleonic view that an army marches on its merriment, not its stomach. ‘A sad army can never undertake the toughest assignments,’ he wrote, ‘and it’s more likely to suffer illness.’25

  The belles of Petersburg trooped down to entertain him and deceive their husbands. Praskovia Potemkina of the flawless skin and perfect face was now firmly esconced as ‘favourite sultana’,26 and supplicants waited in her antechambers to ask for favours.27 Praskovia and the Prince enjoyed a deep love affair in Jassy. ‘You are my pleasure and my priceless treasure, you are God’s gift to me,’ he wrote, adding that his love expressed itself to her, not in mad passion or drunkenness, but in ‘never ending tenderness’. Without her, ‘I’m only half of myself…you are the soul of my soul, my Parashinka.’ He always enjoyed choosing dresses for his nieces and designing habits for monks, and Praskovia must have looked fetching in uniforms because he wrote to her: ‘Do you know, beautiful sweetheart, you are a Cuirassier in my regiment. The helmet suits you perfectly, everything fits you. Today I shall put a bishop’s hat on you…Do me a favour, my unrivalled beauty, make up a dress of calico and purple satin…’. He told her which jewels to wear – which to string, which to mount in a diadem. He even designed their imaginary house of love, which reveals the touching originality of this strange, sensitive man: ‘I drew you patterns, I brought you diamonds, now I am drawing you a small house and garden in the oriental taste with all the magical luxuries…’. There would be a big hall, the sound of a fountain. Upstairs, there would be a lighted gallery with ‘pictures of Hero and Leander, Apollo and Daphne…the most ardent poems of Sappho’ and an erotic painting of Praskovia herself ‘in a white short dress, girded by a delicate lilac belt, open at the breast, hair loose and unpowdered, the chemise held by a ruby…’. The bed would be surrounded by ‘curtains as thin as smoke’ in a room with aquamarine glass. ‘But the place where luxury will exhaust itself is the bath’, which would be surrounded by mirrors and filled with water, scented with rose, lilac, jasmine, and orange’. Serenissimus was ‘cheerful when you’re cheerful, I’m full up when you’re full up’.28

  * * *

  —

  When the Prince was in love, he would do anything for his mistress. In March and April 1790, he even ordered Faleev to rename two of his ships after Praskovia.29 ‘The jewels, diamonds and all the treasures of the four parts of the world were used to decorate her charms.’ When she wanted jewels, Colonel Bauer galloped off to Paris; when she talked about perfumes, Major Lamsdorf headed for Florence and returned with two fragrant carriages of it.30

  Here is his Parisian shopping-list for one of those legendary missions, probably for Praskovia and other ‘sultanas’, in July 1790, second year of the French Revolution. The courier was Lamsdorf. When he arrived in Paris, the Russian envoy Baron Simolin was expected to drop everything. ‘I have not ceased to occupy myself with him in the execution of the commissions Your Highness has wished to be discharged in Paris and to assist him with my advice and that of a lady of my acquaintance.’ It sounds as if Simolin recruited his mistress to make sure he was buying the right stockings. Indeed, ‘we have taken care to execute all things in the latest fashion’. Without the lady and Lamsdorf, Simolin admitted he could not have bought the following:

  – fashion pieces [ballgowns] made by Mademoiselles Gosfit, Madame de Modes

  14,333 livres

  – fashion pieces [ballgowns] made by Henry Desreyeux

  9,488 livres

  – a piece of muslin from the Indies, embroidery from India in silk and silver (Henry Desreyeux)

  2400 livres

  – [fashion from] Madame Plumesfeur

  724 lives

  – seller of Rubies

  1224 livres

  – madame the florist

  826 livres

  – couturier for 4 corsets

  255 livres

  – shoemakers for 72 pairs of shoes [ball slippers]

  446 livres

  – embroiderer for 12 pairs of shoes [ball slippers]

  288 livres

  – a pair of ear muffs

  132 livres

  – the stocking maker for 6 dozen pairs

  648 livres

  – rubies

  248 livres

  – madame the gauze seller

  858 livres

  – the wrapping-up man Bocqueux

  1200 livres.31

  One suspects that not all of these were for the Prince himself. As soon as all the craftsmen and seamstresses had finished their work, Lamsdorf galloped them back to Jassy. These frivolous missions were also useful: the couriers who brought delicacies and ballgowns from Paris bore Potemkin’s vast correspondence – twenty to thirty letters a day – and collected intelligence and replies; for example, Stackelberg in Warsaw reported that Potemkin’s fastest courier had delivered an urgent despatch on his way to the West.32 This was a diplomatic, espionage, ballgown and catering service, all in one.

  Serenissimus was certainly extravagant. That trip cost 44,000 livres for fourteen items, approximately £2,000, at a time when an English gentleman could live comfortably on £300 a year. It was more than the annual salary of a Russian field-marshal (7,000 roubles).33 These missions were quite frequent. Potemkin even sent Grimm regular shopping-lists of female clothing, maps or musical instruments which Catherine’s philosophe dutifully provided.34 However, Potemkin’s notorious inefficiency in paying debts drove Simolin to distraction. On 25 December 1788, he was even forced to appeal to Bezborodko for help in getting the Prince to pay for an earlier expedition that had cost another 32,000 livres.35

  Potemkin’s lifestyle had been royal if not imperial since 1774, and he possessed ‘a fortune greater than certain kings’.36 It is impossible to work out the exact sums: even on his death, his estate was unquantifiable. The Prince was ‘prodigiously rich and not worth a farthing’, wrote Ligne, ‘preferring prodigality and giving, to regularity in paying’.37 This was almost literally true, because he was essentially a member of the imperial household – so that, the Treasury was his private bank. ‘It is true Potemkin had immediate access to the State Treasury,’ claimed Masson, ‘but he also spent a great deal for the State and showed himself as much a Grand Prince of Russia as a favourite of Catherine.’38 Pushkin later recorded the story that, when a Treasury clerk queried Potemkin’s latest request for money, he sent back a note that read: ‘Pay up or fuck off!’ It was said that Catherine ordered the Treasury to regard his requests like her own, but this was not quite so.39

  There is no record of Catherine ever turning down any of Potemkin’s requests for money, but he still had to apply for the money, even though he knew it would be granted. During the building of his towns and fleets and during the war, massive amounts of money poured through his hands, but the image of his wanton waste of public funds is not borne out by the archives, which show how the money was assigned by Catherine, via Procurator-General Viazemsky, and then distributed by Pot
emkin, via his offices and officials like Faleev, Zeitlin or Popov, down to the actual regiments and fleets. Much of it never actually reached the Prince himself – though he was too grand to concern himself with smaller sums and Viazemsky complained to the Empress that he had neglected to account for all of it. This touches on the question of his financial probity. In his case, it was a meaningless concept: Serenissimus used his own money for the state and the Treasury for his personal uses and saw little difference between the two.40

  The Prince was hungry for money and he loved spending it – but it did not interest him for its own sake. He had to spend a fortune to maintain himself in the style of imperial consort when even senior courtiers strained themselves to keep up appearances. Furthermore, the delays in payments by the Treasury meant that, in order to push through his projects and raise his armies, he had to spend his own money. His avidity for riches was part of his insurance policy against the accession of Paul, one reason he invested in Polish land.

  Once he was showing some officers round one of his palaces when they came upon a gold bath. The officers raved about it so much that Potemkin shouted: ‘If you can shit enough to fill it up, you can keep it.’ When a flatterer marvelled at the resplendence of some ball he gave, the Prince snapped: ‘What, sir, do you presume to know the depth of my purse?’ Potemkin himself never had any idea of its depth. He just knew there was almost no bottom: his fortune was variously estimated at nine, sixteen, forty and fifty million roubles. But given that during war and peace the whole military and southern development budgets of the Empire passed through his Chancellery, these figures are irrelevant and his debts enormous.41