Catherine the Great & Potemkin Read online

  The Prince rallied the next day, 27 September. Nothing made him feel better than a line from the Empress. Her letters arrived with the shaggy fur coat and dressing gown, but they made him think about his past with her and his future. ‘Abundant tears always flow from his eyes at every mention of Your Majesty’s name.’ He managed to write her this note: ‘Dear Matushka, life is even harder for me when I don’t see you.’25

  On 30 September, he turned fifty-two. Everyone tried to comfort him but, whenever he remembered Catherine, he ‘wept bitterly’ because he would never see her again. That day, thousands of versts to the north, the Empress, reading all Popov’s reports, wrote to her ‘dear friend’: ‘I am endlessly worried about your illness. For Christ’s sake,’ she implored, he must take his medicines. ‘And after taking it, I beg you to keep yourself from meals and drinks that ruin the medicine’s effect.’ She was reacting to Popov’s reports from ten days before, but, as her letter was leaving Petersburg, Potemkin woke up finding it difficult to breathe, probably a symptom of pneumonia. The fever returned again and he fainted. On 2 October, he woke up feeling better. They tried to persuade him to take the quinine but he refused. And then, desperate to see the steppes, this eternal bedouin yearned to travel again and feel the wind off the Black Sea. ‘His Highness wishes that we take him away from here,’ Popov told Catherine, ‘but I don’t know how we can move him. He’s so exhausted.’26

  The entourage discussed what to do, while the Prince wrote his last letter to the Empress in his own hand – a simple, courtly expression of devotion to the woman he loved:

  Matushka, Most Merciful Lady! In my present condition, so tired by illness, I pray to the Most High to keep your precious health and I throw myself down at your holy feet.

  Your Imperial Majesty’s most faithful and most grateful subject,

  Prince Potemkin of Taurida.

  Oh Matushka, how ill I am!

  Then he collapsed, did not recognize anyone and subsided into coma. The doctors struggled to find a pulse for nine hours. His hands and feet were cold as ice.27

  In Petersburg, Catherine was just reading the letters of the 25th and 27th – ‘life is even harder when I don’t see you’. She wept. She even examined the handwriting, trying to find some hope. ‘I confess I am desperately worried by them but I see that your last three lines are written a little better,’ she wrote in her last letter to her friend. ‘And your doctors assure me you are better. I pray to God…’. She also wrote to Branicka: ‘Please stay with him…Goodbye, dear soul. God bless you.’28

  In the afternoon, Potemkin awoke and commanded that they set out. He believed that if he could reach Nikolaev he would recover. He could not sleep that night, but he was calm. The next morning, he kept asking, ‘What time is it? Is everything ready?’ It was too foggy, but he insisted. They sat him in an armchair and carried him to the six-seater carriage, where they tried to make him comfortable. He dictated his last letter to tell Catherine he was exhausted. Popov brought it to show him and, at the bottom, he managed to scrawl, ‘The only escape is to leave.’ But he was not strong enough to sign it.

  At 8 a.m. accompanied by doctors, Cossacks and niece, his carriage moved off across the open steppe towards the Bessarabian hills.

  Skip Notes

  *1 Mozart died soon afterwards on 24 November/5 December 1791.

  *2 The Beautiful Greek was presumably no longer required – she disappeared as his illness worsened. Branicka probably ordered her to entertain the Polish magnates arriving to see the Prince.

  *3 Jeremy Bentham, whose utilitarianism measured the success of a ruler by the happiness he gave to his subjects, would have appreciated this: one wonders if Samuel had discussed the idea with the Prince on one of their long carriage rides across the south.

  EPILOGUE

  LIFE AFTER DEATH

  They trample heroes? – No! – Their deeds

  Shine through the darkness of the ages.

  Their graves, like hills in springtime, bloom.

  Potemkin’s work will be inscribed.

  Gavrili Derzhavin, The Waterfall

  The next day, the body was solemnly returned to Jassy for post-mortem and embalming. The dissection was carried out in his apartments in the Ghika Palace.*1 Slicing open the soft and majestic belly, Dr Massot and his assistants examined the organs and then extracted them one by one, feeding out the entrails like a hose-pipe.1 They found the innards were very ‘wet’, awash with bilious fluid. The liver was swollen. The symptoms suggested a ‘bilious attack’. There were the inevitable rumours of poisoning, but there was not the slightest evidence. It is most likely that Potemkin was weakened by his fever, whether typhus or malaria, haemorrhoids, drinking and general exhaustion, but these did not necessarily kill him. His earaches, phlegm and difficulties in breathing mean he probably died of bronchial pneumonia. In any case, the stench of the bile was unbearable. Nothing, not even the embalming process, could cleanse it.2

  The doctors embalmed the body: Massot sawed a triangular hole in the back of the skull and drained the brains out of it. He then filled the cranium with aromatic grasses and potions to dry and preserve the famous head. The viscera were placed in a box, the heart in a golden urn. The corpse was sewn up again like a sack and then dressed in its finest uniform.

  All around it, chaos reigned. Potemkin’s generals argued about who was to command the army. Everything – a body, a fortune, the imperial love letters, the war and peace of an empire – awaited the reaction of the Empress.3 When the news reached St Petersburg just seven days later, the Empress fainted, wept, was bled, suffered from insomnia and went into seclusion. Her secretary recorded her days of ‘tears and desperation’, but she calmed herself by writing a panegyric to Potemkin’s

  excellent heart…rare understanding and unusual breadth of mind; his views were always broadminded and generous; he was extremely humane, full of knowledge, exceptionally kind and always full of new ideas; nobody had such a gift for finding the right word and making witty remarks. His military qualities during this war must have struck everyone as he never failed on land or sea. Nobody on earth was less led by others…In a word, he was a statesman in both counsel and execution.

  But it was their personal relationship she most cherished: ‘He was passionately and zealously attached to me, scolding me when he thought I could have done better…his most precious quality was courage of heart and soul which distinguished him from the rest of humanity and which meant we understood each other perfectly and left the less enlightened to babble at their leisure…’. It is a fine and just tribute.

  She awoke weeping again the next day. ‘How can I replace Potemkin?’, she asked. ‘Who would have thought Chernyshev and other men would outlive him? Yes I am old. He was a real nobleman, an intelligent man, he did not betray me, he could not be bought.’ There were ‘tears’ and ‘tears’ again.4 Catherine mourned like a member of Potemkin’s family. They wrote to one another: consolation by graphomania. ‘Our grief is universal,’ she told Popov, ‘but I’m so raw I can’t even talk about it.’5 The nieces, travelling to Jassy for the funeral, felt the same. ‘My father is dead and I am rolling tears of grief,’ wrote his ‘kitten’ Katinka Skavronskaya to Catherine. ‘I became accustomed to rely on him for my happiness…’. She had just received a loving letter from him when the news of her ‘orphanage’ arrived.6 Varvara Golitsyna, whom Potemkin had loved so passionately right after Catherine, remembered, ‘he was so tender, so gracious, so kind to us’.7

  * * *

  —

  Business had to go on. Indeed Catherine, with the selfishness of monarchs, grumbled about the inconvenience as well her grief: ‘Prince Potemkin has played me a cruel turn by dying! It is me on whom all the burden now falls.’8 The Council met the day the news arrived, and Bezborodko was despatched to Jassy to finish the peace talks. In Constantinople, the Grand Vizier enc
ouraged Selim III to start the war again, while the foreign ambassadors rightly told him peace was more likely now that the future King of Dacia was dead.9

  Catherine ordered ‘Saint’ Mikhail Potemkin to fetch her letters from Jassy and sort out the Prince’s labyrinthine finances. But the imperial letters were the holiest relics of Potemkin’s legacy. Mikhail Potemkin and Vasily Popov argued over them.10 The latter insisted on handing them over himself. So Mikhail11 left without them.*2

  The murky question of the fortune, however, took twenty years and three emperors to settle and was never unravelled. Since 1783, it seems Potemkin had received a total of 55 million roubles – including 51,352,096 roubles and 94 kopecks from the state to pay his armies, build his fleets and construct his cities, and almost 4 million of his own money. His spending of millions could not be accounted for.*3 Emperor Paul restarted the investigation, but his successor Alexander, who had danced at Potemkin’s ball, gave up the impossible task and the subject was finally closed.12

  Petersburg talked of nothing but his mythical personal fortune – millions or just debts? ‘Although his legacy was considerable, especially the diamonds,’ Count Stedingk told Gustavus III, ‘one guesses that when all the debts are paid, the seven heirs will not have much left.’13 Catherine was also interested: she could have left his debts for his heirs, which would have used up the entire fortune, said to be worth seven million roubles, but she understood that Potemkin had used the Treasury as his own bank, while spending his own money for the state – it was impossible to differentiate. ‘Nobody knows exactly what the deceased left,’ wrote the unprejudiced Bezborodko, arriving in Jassy. ‘He owes a lot to the Treasury but the Treasury owes a lot to him.’ Furthermore, the Court banker Baron Sutherland died at almost the same time as his patron, exposing a financial scandal which was potentially dangerous to Russia’s fragile credit. Potemkin owed Sutherland 762,785 roubles14 – and a total in Petersburg alone of 2.1 million roubles.15

  Catherine settled the money with her characteristic generosity, buying the Taurida Palace from his heirs for 935,288 roubles plus his art collection, his glass factory, a million roubles of diamonds and some estates. She paid off the debts herself and left the bulk of the fortune to be divided among seven greedy and now very wealthy heirs, a selection of Engelhardts and Samoilovs. In Smila alone, they each received 14,000 male souls, without even counting the Russian lands, yet they were still arguing over the swag a decade later.16 Even two centuries later, in Soviet times, the villagers of Chizhova were digging up the churchyard in the quest for Potemkin’s lost treasure.

  * * *

  —

  The Empress ordered that social life in Petersburg should cease. There were no Court receptions, no Little Hermitages. ‘The Empress doesn’t appear.’17 Some admired her grief: Masson understood that ‘it was not the lover she regretted. It was the friend whose genius was assimilated to her own.’18 Stedingk thought Catherine’s sensibilité was greater praise of the Prince than any panegyric.19 The capital was draped in a ‘veneer of mourning’, but much of it concealed jubilance.20

  While the lesser nobility and junior officers, whose wives wore his medallion round their necks, mourned a hero, some of the old noble and military establishment celebrated.21 Rostopchin, who thought Zubov ‘a twit’, was nonetheless ‘charmed’ that everyone so quickly forgot the ‘fall of the Colossus of Rhodes’.22 Grand Duke Paul is supposed to have muttered that the Empire now boasted one less thief – but then Potemkin had kept him from his rightful place for almost twenty years. Zubov, ‘without being triumphant’, was like a man who could finally breathe ‘at the end of a long and hard subordination’.23

  However, three of the most talented men in the Empire, two of them supposedly his mortal enemies, regretted him. When Field-Marshal Rumiantsev-Zadunaisky, natural son of Peter the Great, heard the news, his entourage expected him to celebrate. Instead, he knelt in front of an icon. ‘What’s so surprising?’, he asked his companions. ‘The Prince was my rival, even my enemy, but Russia has lost a great man…immortal for his deeds.’24 Bezborodko admitted he was ‘indebted’ to ‘a very rare and exquisite man’.25 Suvorov was sad, saying Potemkin was ‘a great man and a man great, great in mind and height: not like that tall French ambassador in London about whom Lord Chancellor Bacon said that “the garret is badly furnished” ’, but he was simultaneously ‘the image of all earthly vanity’. Suvorov felt the heroic age was finished: Potemkin had used him as his own King Leonidas of Sparta. He twice went to pray at Potemkin’s tomb.26

  In Jassy, Engelhardt asked the peasant–soldiers if they preferred Rumiantsev or Potemkin. They acclaimed Rumiantsev’s ‘frightening but energetic’ record, but the Prince ‘was our father, lightened our service, supplied us with all we needed; we’ll never have a commander like him again. God make his memory live forever.’27 In Petersburg, soldiers wept for him.28 Even malicious Rostopchin admitted that Potemkin’s Grenadiers were crying – though he said it was because they had lost ‘the privilege of stealing’.29 Bezborodko heard the soldiers mourning Potemkin. When he quizzed them about the deprivations of Ochakov, they usually replied, ‘But it was necessary at the time…’ and Potemkin had treated them with humanity.30 But the best tributes are the marching songs about Potemkin which the soldiers sang in the Napoleonic Wars.

  Here rests not famed by war alone

  A man whose soul was greater still

  Gavrili Derzhavin, The Waterfall

  The Prince’s outrageous personality aroused such emotions in his lifetime and afterwards that it obscured any objective analysis of his achievements and indeed has distorted them grotesquely. His enemies accused him of laziness, corruption, debauchery, indecision, extravagance, falsification, military incompetence and disinformation on a vast scale. The sybaritism and extravagance are the only ones that are truly justified. Even his enemies always admitted his intelligence, force of personality, spectacular vision, courage, generosity and great achievements. ‘It cannot be denied’, wrote Catherine’s earliest biographer Castera, ‘that he had the mind and courage and energy which, with the gradual unfolding of his talents, fitted him for a prime minister.’ Ligne believed that, in making Potemkin, Nature had used ‘the stuff she would usually have used to create a hundred men.’31

  As a conqueror and colonizer, he ranks close to his hero Peter the Great, who founded a city and a fleet on the Baltic as Potemkin created cities and a fleet on the Black Sea. Both died at fifty-two. There the similarities end, for Potemkin was as humane and forgiving as Peter was brutal and vengeful. But the Prince can be understood and therefore appreciated only in the light of his unique, almost equal partnership with Catherine: it was an unparalleled marriage of love and politics. At its simplest, it was a tender love affair and a noble friendship, but that is to ignore its colossal achievements. None of the legendary romances of history quite matches its exuberant political success.

  The relationship enabled Potemkin to outstrip any other minister–favourite and to behave like a tsar. He flaunted his imperial status because he had no limits, but this made him all the more resented. He behaved eccentrically because he could. But his problems stem from the unique ambiguity of his situation, for, though he had the power of a co-tsar, he was not one. He suffered, as all favourites do, from the belief that the monarch was controlled by an ‘evil counsellor’ – hence his first biography was called Prince of Darkness. If he had been a tsar, he would have been judged for his achievements, not his lifestyle: crowned heads could behave as they wished but ersatz emperors are never forgiven for their indulgences. ‘The fame of the Empire was increased by his conquests,’ says Ségur, ‘yet the admiration they excited was for her and the hatred they raised was for him.’32

  Serenissimus was a dynamic politician but a cautious soldier. He was slowly competent in direct command, but outstanding as supreme strategist and commander-in-chief on land and sea: he was one of the first
to co-ordinate amphibious operations on different fronts across a vast theatre. He was blamed for the fact that the Russian army was chaotic and corrupt, faults as true today as they were two centuries ago, but he deserves credit for its achievements too. When Bezborodko33 reached the army in 1791, for example, he was amazed at the order he found there, despite what he had heard. Nor were his adversaries as weak as they became: the Turks several times defeated the Austrians, who were supposedly much more competent than the Russians. Overall, Potemkin has been underestimated by military history: he should be upgraded from the ranks of incompetent commanders to those of the seriously able, though second to contemporary geniuses like Frederick the Great, Suvorov or Napoleon. As Catherine told Grimm, he delivered only victories. Few generals can boast that. In the tolerance and decency he showed to his men, Potemkin was unique in Russian history, even today in the age of the Chechen War. ‘No man up to that time,’ wrote Wiegel, ‘had put his power to less evil ends.’

  Thirty years later, the Comte de Langeron, whose prejudiced accounts of Potemkin did as much damage to his reputation as those of Ligne and Helbig, admitted, ‘I judged him with great severity, and my resentment influenced my opinions.’ Then he judged him justly:

  Of course he had all the faults of courtiers, the vulgarities of parvenus, and the absurdities of favourites but they were all grist to the mill of the extent and force of his genius. He had learnt nothing but divined everything. His mind was as big as his body. He knew how to conceive and execute his wonders, and such a man was necessary to Catherine. Conqueror of the Crimea, subduer of the Tartars, transplanter of the Zaporogians to the Kuban and civilizer [of the Cossacks], founder of Kherson, Nikolaev, Sebastopol, establisher of shipyards in three cities, creator of a fleet, dominator of the Black Sea…all these marvellous policies should assure him of recognition.