Catherine the Great & Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair

Acclaim for Simon Sebag Montefiore’s

CATHERINE THE GREAT AND POTEMKIN

Colorful figures cross the pages of this flamboyant biography…. A rollicking tale, balanced in treatment of its controversial characters.

—The Boston Globe

Superb…sumptuous…. Montefiore has a journalist’s instinct for getting behind the official version of events.

—The Daily Telegraph (London)

A wonderful story, and Sebag Montefiore tells it with joyful verve…. The material is so enjoyable, and it is related with evident pleasure and enthusiasm.

—The Times (London)

A good, racy historical read…. The amazing story of Catherine the Great’s lover, then favorite, then secret husband, then chief advisor in ruling Russia, might seem the stuff of fiction; fortunately Sebag Montefiore’s researches have been so evidently extensive that this is clearly not the case.

—Antonia Fraser, author of The Wives of Henry VIII

With great industry and huge enthusiasm [Montefiore] has combed the archives to give us a detailed account of a gigantic…figure.

—Sunday Express (London)

[Montefiore’s] fascination shines through every page of this book…. It could easily have been double the length, so enjoyable is it to read.

—The Sunday Telegraph (London)

Effortlessly readable and compelling. This is history as it should be written.

—The Sunday Herald

A wonderful book…as magnificent as its subject…. Captures the iridescent spirit of Russia’s greatest adventurer.

—Amanda Foreman, author of Georgiana

This splendid biography, as sprawling, magnificent and exotic as its subject, provides for the first time in English a fully researched, accurate, and immensely readable history of this extraordinary man.

—Literary Review

A passionate, but scholarly, defense of one of the greatest creative figures in Russian history.

—Evening Standard (London)

Exhaustive and beautifully written…. A magnificent biography…which is as industrious and exuberant as the man himself.

—Daily Mail (London)

Montefiore’s enthusiasm and knowledge make this much more than just an engaging biography, it is a headlong gallop of a read.

—Anthony Beevor, author of Stalingrad

This gripping and richly researched biography…makes it easy to see why novelists are often seduced away from fiction to write biography—where, just sometimes, implausible reality exceeds plausible fantasy many times over.

—Peter Nasmyth, Times Literary Supplement

An example of how to make a page-turner out of the most profound scholarship.

—New Statesman

This book…written with great verve…is based on a wealth of sources…Montefiore’s narrative breathes new life into them. Montefiore makes the reader appreciate the genius and forgive the absurdity.

—Professor Lindsey Hughes, Rossica

"[Catherine the Great and Potemkin] opened up a whole new world…to me."

—Alain de Botton, Sunday Telegraph (Books of the Year)

A rather wonderful book.

—Mick Jagger, Sunday Times

Simon Sebag Montefiore

CATHERINE THE GREAT AND POTEMKIN

Simon Sebag Montefiore is a prizewinning historian whose bestselling books have been published in over forty languages. Catherine the Great and Potemkin was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize; Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar won the History Book of the Year Prize at the British Book Awards; Young Stalin won the Costa Biography Prize, Los Angeles Times Biography Prize and Le Grand Prix de Biographie; Jerusalem was a number-one international bestseller. His most recent book is The Romanovs. Montefiore is also the author of the acclaimed novels Sashenka and One Night in Winter. He read history at Cambridge University where he received his PhD, and lives in London with his wife, the novelist Santa Montefiore, and their two children.

ALSO BY SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE

nonfiction

The Romanovs

Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar

Young Stalin

Jerusalem: The Biography

Titans of History

fiction

Sashenka

One Night in Winter

To Santa

VINTAGE BOOKS EDITIONS, 2005, 2016

Copyright © 2000, 2016 by Sebag Montefiore

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published under the title Prince of Princes: The Life of Potemkin in Great Britain by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, in 2000, and subsequently in slightly different form in hardcover in the United States by Thomas Dunne Books, an imprint of St. Martin’s Press, LLC, New York, in 2001. Published here by arrangement with St. Martin’s Press, LLC. Originally published as Potemkin: Catherine the Great’s Imperial Partner in trade paperback by Vintage Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, in 2005.

Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

Cataloging-in-Publication Data for Potemkin: Catherine the Great’s Imperial Partner is on file at the Library of Congress.

Vintage Books Trade Paperback ISBN 9780525431961

Ebook ISBN 9780593467916

Cover design by Two Associates

www.vintagebooks.com

a_prh_5.7.0_148359414_c0_r1

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgements

Notes

Preface

prologue: Death on the Steppes

part one: potemkin and catherine 1739–1762

1 The Provincial Boy

2 The Guardsman and the Grand Duchess: Catherine’s Coup

3 First Meeting: The Empress’s Reckless Suitor

part two: closer 1762–1774

4 Cyclops

5 The War Hero

6 The Happiest Man Alive

part three: together 1774–1776

7 Love

8 Power

9 Marriage: Madame Potemkin

10 Heartbreak and Understanding

part four: the passionate partnership 1776–1777

11 Her Favourites

12 His Nieces

13 Duchesses, Diplomats and Charlatans

part five: the colossus 1777–1783

14 Byzantium

15 The Holy Roman Emperor

16 Three Marriages and a Crown

17 Potemkin’s Paradise: The Crimea

part six: the co-tsar 1784–1786

18 Emperor of the South

19 British Blackamoors and Chechen Warriors

20 Anglomania: The Benthams in Russia and the Emperor of Gardens

21 The White Negro

22 A Day in the Life of Grigory Alexandrovich

part seven: the apogee 1787–1790

23 The Magical Theatre

24 Cleopatra

25 The Amazons

26 Jewish Cossacks and American Admirals: Potemkin’s War

27 Cry Havoc: The Storming of Ochakov

28 My Successes Are Yours

29 The Delicious and the Cruel: Sardanapalus

30 Sea of Slaughter: Ismail

part eight: the last dance 1791

31 The Beautiful Greek

32 Carnival and Crisis

33 The Last Ride

epilogue: Life After Death

Illustrations

List of Characters

Maps

Family Trees

Notes

Select Bibliography

ILLUSTRATIONS

Serenissimus Prince Grigory Potemkin, by Johann Baptist von Lampi (1751–1830), Hermitage, St Petersburg, photo by N. Y. Bolotina

Cathrine the Great in 1762 by Vigilius Ericksen (1722–1782), Musée des Beaux-Arts, Chartres, France, Lauros-Giraudon/Bridgeman Art Library

Countess Alexandra Branicka by R. Brompton, Alupka Palace Museum, Ukraine, photo by the author

Portrait of Paul I, 1796–7 by Stepan Semeonovich Shukin (1762–1828), Hermitage, St Petersburg, Russia/Bridgeman Art Library

Potemkin’s Palacesacid.*

Portrait of Catherine II the Great in Travelling Costume, 1787 (oil on canvas) by Mikhail Shibanov (fl. 1783–89), State Russian Museum, St Petersburg, Russia/Bridgeman Art Library

Prince Potemkin-Tavrichesky as Grand Admiral of Black Sea Fleet, attributed to J. B. Lampi, Suvorov Museum, St Petersburg, photo by Leonid Bogdanov

Potemkin’s signature

Catherine the Great, 1973 by Johann Baptist von Lampi (1751–1830), Hermitage, St Petersburg, Russia/Bridgeman Art Library

Portrait of Prince Grigori Potemkin-Tavrichesky, c. 1790 by Johann Baptist von Lampi (1751–1830), Hermitage, St Petersburg, Russia/Bridgeman Art Library

The roadside memorials marking Potemkin’s death, photo by author

The board announcing Potemkin’s death, photo by author

The trapdoor in St Catherine’s church in Kherson, Ukraine, leading to Potemkin’s tomb, photo by author

Potemkin’s coffin, St Catherine’s, Kherson, Ukraine, photo by author

The ruined church in Potemkin’s home village of Chizhova, Russia, photo author’s collection

Potemkin in Chevalier-Garde uniform, collection of V. S. Lopatin

Potemkin’s mother, Daria Potemkina, Portraits Russes by Grand Duke Nikolai Mikhailovich, picture courtesy of the British Library

The Empress Elisabeth, daughter of Peter the Great, etching by E. Chemesov, Weidenfeld & Nicolson picture collection

The Grand Duchess Catherine with husband Peter and their son, Paul, Weidenfeld & Nicolson picture collection

Field-Marshal Peter Rumiantsev at the Battle of Kagul, 1770, Weidenfeld & Nicolson picture collection

Grigory Orlov, Portraits Russes by Grand Duke Nikolai Mikhailovich, picture courtesy of the British Library

Alexei Orlov, Portraits Russes by Grand Duke Nikolai Mikhailovich picture courtesy of the British Library

Catherine and Potemkin in her boudoir, author’s collection

Alexander Lanskoy, by D. G. Levitsky, Portraits Russes by Grand Duke Nikolai Mikhailovich, picture courtesy of the British Library

Count Alexander Dmitriyev-Mamonov, by Mikhail Shibanov, Portraits Russes by Grand Duke Nikolai Mikhailovich, picture courtesy of the British Library

Princess Varvara Golitsyna, Portraits Russes by Grand Duke Nikolai Mikhailovich, picture courtesy of the British Library

Countess Ekaterina Skavronskaya with her daughter, by Angelica Kauffman, Portraits Russes by Grand Duke Nikolai Mikhailovich, picture courtesy of the British Library

Princess Tatiana Yusupova, by E. Vigée Lebrun, Portraits Russes by Grand Duke Nikolai Mikhailovich, picture courtesy of the British Library

Portrait of Ekaterina Samoilova by Johann Baptist von Lampi (1751–1830), Portraits Russes by Grand Duke Nikolai Mikhailovich, picture courtesy of the British Library

Elizabeth Chudleigh, Duchess of Kingston, photo author’s collection

Joseph II and Catherine meeting 1787, Weidenfeld & Nicolson picture collection

Charles-Joseph, Prince de Ligne, photo author’s collection

Catherine walking in the park at Tsarskoe Selo, by V. L. Borovikovsky, Weidenfeld & Nicolson picture collection

The storming of the Turkish fortress of Ochakov in 1788, Odessa State Local History Museum, photo by Sergei Bereninich, photo author’s collection

Count Alexander Suvorov, Portraits Russes by Grand Duke Nikolai Mikhailovich, picture courtesy of the British Library

The invitation to Potemkin’s ball in the Taurida Palace, 1791, Odessa State Local History Museum, photo by Sergei Bereninich, photo author’s collection

Princess Ekaterina Dolgorukaya by Johann Baptist von Lampi (1751–1830), Portraits Russes by Grand Duke Nikolai Mikhailovich, picture courtesy of the British Library

Countess Sophia Potocka by Johann Baptist von Lampi (1751–1830), Portraits Russes by Grand Duke Nikolai Mikhailovich, picture courtesy of the British Library

Prince Platon Zubov by Johann Baptist von Lampi (1751–1830), Weidenfeld & Nicolson picture collection

Potemkin’s death, 1791, Odessa State Local History Museum, photo by Sergei Bereninich, photo author’s collection

Potemkin’s funeral, Weidenfeld & Nicolson picture collection

*Potemkin’s Palaces: Taurida, photo by author; Anichkov, author’s collection; Ostrovky, author’s collection; Bablovo, photo by author; Ekaterinoslav, photo by author; Nikolaev, Nikolaev State History Museum, photo by author; Kherson, Kherson State History Museum, photo by author

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Over several years and thousands of miles, I have been helped by many people, from the peasant couple who keep bees on the site of Potemkin’s birthplace near Smolensk to professors, archivists and curators from Petersburg, Moscow and Paris to Warsaw, Odessa and Iasi in Rumania.

I owe my greatest debts to three remarkable scholars. The inspiration for this book came from Isabel de Madariaga, Professor Emeritus of Slavonic Studies at the University of London and the doyen of Catherinian history in the West. Her seminal work Russia in the Age of Catherine the Great changed the study of Catherine. She also appreciated the remarkable character of Potemkin and his relationship with the Empress, and declared that he needed a biographer. She has helped with ideas, suggestions and advice throughout the project. Above all, I must thank her for editing and correcting this book during sessions which she conducted with the amused authority and intellectual rigour of the Empress herself, whom she resembles in many ways. It was always I who was exhausted at the end of these sessions, not she. I lay any wisdom in this work at her feet; the follies are mine alone. I am glad that I was able to lay a wreath on her behalf on Potemkin’s neglected grave in Kherson.

I must also thank Alexander B. Kamenskii, Professor of Early & Early-Modern Russian History at Moscow’s Russian State University for the Humanities, and respected authority on Catherine, without whose wisdom, charm and practical help, this could not have been written. I am deeply grateful to V. S. Lopatin, whose knowledge of the archives is without parallel and who was so generous with that knowledge: Lopatin and his wife Natasha have been so hospitable during Muscovite stays. He too has read the book and given me the benefit of his comments.

I must also thank Professor J. T. Alexander for answering my questions and Professor Evgeny Anisimov, who was so helpful during my time in Petersburg. The advice of George F. Jewsbury on Potemkin’s military performance was most enlightening. Thanks to Professor Derek Beales, who helped greatly with Josephist matters especially the mystery of the Circassian slavegirls. I should mention that he and Professor Tim Blanning, both of Sidney Sussex, Cambridge, were the supervisors whose compelling teaching of Enlightened Despotism, while I was an undergraduate, laid the foundations for this book. I want to stress my debt too to three recent works that I have used widely – Lopatin’s Ekaterina i Potemkin Lichnaya Perepiska, the aforementioned book by Isabel de Madariaga, and J. T. Alexander’s Catherine the Great.

—

I would like the thank the following without whom this could not have been written: His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales, for his kind help in connection with his work for the restoration of St Petersburg and the Pushkin Bicentenary. Sergei Degtiarev-Foster, that champion of Russian history who made many things possible from Moscow to Odessa, and Ion Florescu who made the Rumanian-Moldovian expedition such a success. Thanks also to Lord Rothschild, Professor Mikhail Piotrovsky and Geraldine Norman, chairman, president and director of Hermitage Development Trust, who are creating the permanent exhibition of Catherine the Great’s treasures, including the famous Lampi portrait of Potemkin, at Somerset House in London.

I owe a debt to Lord Brabourne for reading the entire book and, for reading parts of it, to Dr Amanda Foreman, Flora Fraser, and especially to Andrew Roberts for his detailed advice and encouragement. William Hanham read the sections on art, Professor John Klier read the Jewish sections, and Adam Zamoyski read those on Poland.

In Moscow, I thank the Directors and staff of the RGADA and RGVIA archives; Natasha Bolotina, with her special knowledge on Potemkin, her mother Svetlana Romanovna, Igor Fedyukin, Dmitri Feldman, and Julia Tourchaninova and Ernst Goussinski, Professors of Education, all helped immensely. Galina Moiseenko, one of the brightest scholars of the History Department of the Russian State Humanities University, was excellent at selecting and finding documents and her historical analysis and precision were flawless.

Thanks to the following. In St Petersburg, I thank my friend Professor Zoia Belyakova, who made everything possible, and Dr Sergei Kuznetzov, Head of Historical Research of the Stroganov Palace Department of the State Russian Museum, and the staff of the RGIA. I am grateful to Professor Mikhail Piotrovsky, Director of the State Hermitage Museum (again), to Vladimir Gesev, Director of the Russian State Museum of the Mikhailovsky Palace; Liudmilla Kurenkova, Assistant to the Director of the Russian State Museum, A. N. Gusanov of the Pavlovsk Palace State Museum; Dr Elana V. Karpova, Head of the XVIII–early XXth Century Sculpture Department of the State Russian Museum, Maria P. Garnova of the Hermitage’s Western Europe Department, and G. Komelova, also of the Hermitage. Ina Lokotnikova showed me the Anichkov Palace and L. I. Diyachenko was kind enough to give me a private tour, using her exhaustive knowledge, of the Taurida Palace. Thanks to Leonid Bogdanov for taking the cover-photograph of Potemkin.

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 Grecian 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.

Serenissimus made his own policies – sometimes inspired, sometimes quixotic – and constructed his own world. While his power depended on his partnership with Catherine, he thought and behaved like one of the sovereign powers of Europe. Potemkin dazzled its Cabinets and Courts with his titanic achievements, erudite knowledge and exquisite taste, while simultaneously scandalizing them with his arrogance and debauchery, indolence and luxury. While hating him for his power and inconsistency, even his enemies acclaimed his intelligence and creativity.

Now this barefoot Prince half staggered – and was half carried by his Cossacks – across the grass. This was a remote and spectacular spot, not even on the main road between Jassy, in today’s Rumania, and Kishnev, in today’s Republic of Moldova. In those days, this was the territory of the Ottoman Sultan, conquered by Potemkin. Even today it is hard to find, but in 200 years it has hardly changed.⁴ The spot where they laid Potemkin was a little plateau beside a steep stone lane whence one could see far in every direction. The countryside to the right was a rolling green valley rising in a multitude of green, bushy mounds into the distance, covered in the now almost vanished high grass of the steppes. To the left, forested hills fell away into the mist. Straight ahead, Potemkin’s entourage would have seen the lane go down and then rise up a higher hill covered in dark trees and thick bushes, disappearing down the valley. Potemkin, who loved to drive his carriage at night through the rain,⁵ had called a stop in a place of the wildest and most beautiful natural drama.⁶

His entourage could only have added to it. The confection of the exotic and the civilized in Potemkin’s companions that day reflected his contradictions: ‘Prince Potemkin is the emblem of the immense Russian Empire,’ wrote the Prince de Ligne, who knew him well, ‘he too is composed of deserts and goldmines.’⁷ His Court – for he was almost royal, though Catherine teasingly called it his ‘basse-cour’, halfway between a royal court and a farmyard⁸ – emerged on to the steppe.

Many of his attendants were already weeping. The Countess, the only woman present, wore the long-sleeved flowing Russian robes favoured by her friend the Empress, but her stockings and shoes were the finest of French fashion, ordered from Paris by Serenissimus himself. Her travelling jewellery was made up of priceless diamonds from Potemkin’s unrivalled collection. Then there were generals and counts in tailcoats and uniforms with sashes and medals and tricorn hats that would not have been remarkable at Horse-Guards in London or any eighteenth-century court, but there was also a sprinkling of Cossack atamans, Oriental princelings, Moldavian boyars, renegade Ottoman pashas, servants, clerks, common soldiers – and the bishops, rabbis, fakirs and mullahs whose company Potemkin most enjoyed. Nothing relaxed him as much as a discussion on Byzantine theology, the customs of some Eastern tribe such as the Bashkirs, or Palladian architecture, Dutch painting, Italian music, English Gardens…

The bishops sported the flowing robes of Orthodoxy, the rabbis the tangled ringlets of Judaism, the Ottoman renegades the turbans, pantaloons and slippers of the Sublime Porte. The Moldavians, Orthodox subjects of the Ottoman Sultan, wore bejewelled kaftans and high hats encircled with fur and encrusted with rubies, the ordinary Russian soldiers the ‘Potemkin’ hats, coats, soft boots and buckskin trousers designed for their ease by the Prince himself. Lastly the Cossacks, most of them Boat Cossacks known as Zaporogians, had fierce moustaches and shaven heads except for a tuft on top leading down the back in a long ponytail, like characters from Last of the Mohicans, and brandished short curved daggers, engraved pistols and their special long lances. They watched sadly, for Potemkin adored the Cossacks.

The woman was Potemkin’s shrewd and haughty niece, Countess Alexandra Branicka, aged thirty-seven and a formidable political force in her own right. Potemkin’s love affairs with the Empress and a brazen parade of noblewomen and courtesans had shocked even French courtiers who remembered Louis XV’s Versailles. Had he really made all five of his legendarily beautiful nieces into his mistresses? Did he love Countess Branicka the most of all?

The Countess ordered them to place a rich Persian rug on the grass. Then she let them lower Prince Potemkin gently on to it. ‘I want to die in the field,’ he said as they settled him there. He had spent the previous fifteen years travelling as fast across Russia’s vastness as any man in the eighteenth century: ‘a trail of sparks marks his swift journey’, wrote the poet Gavrili Derzhavin in his ode to Potemkin, The Waterfall. So, appropriately for a man of perpetual movement, who barely lived in his innumerable palaces, Serenissimus added that he did not want to die in a carriage.⁹ He wanted to sleep out on the steppe.

That morning, Potemkin asked his beloved Cossacks to build him a makeshift tent of their lances, covered with blankets and furs. It was a characteristically Potemkinian idea, as if the purity of a little Cossack camp would cure him of all his suffering.

The anxious doctors, a Frenchman and two Russians, gathered round the prone Prince and the attentive Countess, but there was little they could do. Catherine and Potemkin thought doctors made better players at the card table than healers at the bedside. The Empress joked that her Scottish doctor finished off most of his patients with his habitual panacea for every ailment – a weakening barrage of emetics and bleedings. The doctors were afraid that they would be blamed if the Prince perished, because accusations of poisoning were frequently whispered at the Russian Court. Yet the eccentric Potemkin had been a thoroughly uncooperative patient, opening all the windows, having eau-de-Cologne poured on his head, consuming whole salted geese from Hamburg with gallons of wine – and now setting off on this tormented journey across the steppes.

The Prince was dressed in a rich silk dressing gown, lined with fur, sent to him days earlier by the Empress all the way from distant St Petersburg, almost two thousand versts. Its inside pockets bulged with bundles of the Empress’s secret letters in which she consulted her partner, gossiped with her friend and decided the policies of her Empire. She destroyed most of his letters, but we are grateful that he romantically kept many of hers in that sentimental pocket next to his heart.

Twenty years of these letters reveal an equal and amazingly successful partnership of two statesmen and lovers that was startling in its modernity, touching in its ordinary intimacy and impressive in its statecraft. Their love affair and political alliance was unequalled in history by Antony and Cleopatra, Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, Napoleon and Josephine, because it was as remarkable for its achievements as for its romance, as endearing for its humanity as for its power. Like everything to do with Potemkin, his life with Catherine was crisscrossed with mysteries: were they secretly married? Did they conceive a child together? Did they really share power? Is it true that they agreed to remain partners while indulging themselves with a string of other lovers? Did Potemkin pimp for the Empress, procuring her young favourites, and did she help him seduce his nieces and turn the Imperial Palace into his own family harem?

As his illness ebbed and flowed, his travels were pursued by Catherine’s caring, wifely notes, as she sent dressing gowns and fur coats for him to wear, scolded him for eating too much or not taking his medicines, begged him to rest and recover, and prayed to God not to take her beloved. He wept as he read them.

At this very moment, the Empress’s couriers were galloping in two directions across Russia, changing their exhausted horses at imperial posthouses. They came from St Petersburg, bearing Catherine’s latest letter to the Prince, and from here in Moldavia they bore his latest to her. It had been so for a long time – and they were always longing to receive the freshest news of the other. But now the letters were sadder.

‘My dear friend, Prince Grigory Alexandrovich,’ she wrote on 3 October, ‘I received your letters of the 25th and 27th today a few hours ago and I confess that I am extremely worried by them…I pray God that He gives health back to you soon.’ She was not worried when she wrote this, because it usually took ten days for letters to reach the capital from the south, though it could be done in seven, hell for leather.¹⁰ Ten days before, Potemkin appeared to have recovered – hence Catherine’s calmness. But a few days earlier on 30 September, before his health seemed to improve, her letters were almost frantic. ‘My worry about your sickness knows no bounds,’ she had written. ‘For Christ’s sake, if necessary, take whatever the doctors think might ease your condition. I beg God to give you your energy and health back as soon as possible. Goodbye my friend…I’m sending you a fur coat…’.¹¹ This was just sound and fury – for, while the coat was sent on earlier, neither of the letters reached him in time.

Somewhere in the 2,000 versts that separated the two of them, the couriers must have crossed paths. Catherine would not have been so optimistic if she had read Potemkin’s letter, written on 4 October, the day before, as he set out. ‘Matushka [Little Mother] Most Merciful Lady,’ he dictated to his secretary, ‘I have no energy left to suffer my torments. The only escape is to leave this town and I have ordered them to carry me to Nikolaev. I do not know what will become of me. Most faithful and grateful subject.’ This was written in the secretary’s hand but pathetically, at the bottom of the letter, Potemkin scrawled in a weak, angular and jumping hand: ‘The only escape is to leave.’¹² It was unsigned.

The last batch of Catherine’s letters to reach him had arrived the day before in the pouch of Potemkin’s fastest courier, Brigadier Bauer, the devoted adjutant whom he often sent galloping to Paris to bring back silk stockings, to Astrakhan for sterlet soup, to Petersburg for oysters, to Moscow to bring back a dancer or a chessplayer, to Milan for a sheet of music, a virtuoso violinist or a wagon of perfumes. So often and so far had Bauer travelled on Potemkin’s whim that he jokingly requested this for his epitaph: ‘Cy git Bauer sous ce rocher, Fouette, cocher!’¹³*1

As they gathered round him on the steppe, the officials and courtiers would have reflected on the implications of this scene for Europe, for their Empress, for the unfinished war with the Turks, for the possibilities of action against revolutionary France and defiant Poland. Potemkin’s armies and fleets had conquered huge tracts of Ottoman territory around the Black Sea and in today’s Rumania: now the Sultan’s Grand Vizier hoped to negotiate a peace with him. The Courts of Europe – from the port-sodden young First Lord of the Treasury, William Pitt, in London, who had failed to halt Potemkin’s war, to the hypochondriacal old Chancellor, Prince Wenzel von Kaunitz, in Vienna – carefully followed Potemkin’s illness.

His schemes could change the map of the Continent. Potemkin juggled crowns like a clown in a circus. Would this mercurial visionary make himself a king? Or was he more powerful as he was – consort of the Empress of all the Russias? If he was crowned, would it be as king of Dacia, in modern Rumania, or King of Poland, where his sprawling estates already made him a feudal magnate? Would he save Poland, or partition it? Even as he lay on the steppe, Polish potentates were gathering secretly to await his mysterious orders.

These questions would be answered by the outcome of this desperate rush from the fever-stricken city of Jassy to the new town of Nikolaev, inland from the Black Sea, to which the sick man wished to be borne. Nikolaev was his last city. He had founded many, like the hero whose achievements he had emulated, Peter the Great. Potemkin designed each city, treating it lovingly like a cherished mistress or a treasured work of art. Nikolaev (now in Ukraine) was a naval and military base, on the cool banks of the Bug, where he had built himself a Moldavian–Turkish-style palace, low by the river, cooled by a steady breeze that would ease his fever.¹⁴ This was a long journey for a dying man.

—

The convoy had left the day before. The party spent the night in a village en route and set off at 8 a.m. After five versts, Potemkin was so uncomfortable that they transferred him to the sleeping carriage. He still managed to sit up.¹⁵ After five more versts, they had stopped right here.¹⁶

The Countess cradled his head: at least she was there, for the two best friends in his life were women. One was this favourite niece; the other, of course, was the Empress herself, fretting a thousand miles away, waiting for news. On the steppe, Potemkin was shaking, sweating and moaning, undergoing agonizing convulsions. ‘I am burning,’ he said. ‘I’m on fire!’ Countess Branicka, known as ‘Sashenka’ to Catherine and Potemkin, urged him to be calm, but ‘he answered that the light grew dark in his eyes, he could not see any more and was able only to understand voices.’ The blindness was a symptom of falling blood pressure, common in the dying. Ravaged by malarial fever, probable liver failure and pneumonia, after years of compulsive overwork, frantic travel, nervous tension and unbridled hedonism, his powerful metabolism was finally collapsing. The Prince asked the doctors: ‘What can you cure me with now?’ Dr Sanovsky answered that ‘he had to put his hopes only in God’. He handed a travelling icon to Potemkin, who embraced both the mischievous scepticism of the French Enlightenment and the superstitious piety of the Russian peasantry. Potemkin was strong enough to take it. He kissed it.

An old Cossack, watching nearby, noticed that the Prince was slipping away and said so respectfully, with the sensitivity to death found among frontiersmen who live close to nature. Potemkin removed his hands from the icon. Branicka held them in hers. Then she embraced him.¹⁷ At the supreme moment, he naturally thought of his beloved Catherine and murmured: ‘Forgive me, merciful Mother–Sovereign.’¹⁸ Then Potemkin died.¹⁹ He was fifty-two.

The circle froze around the body in that shocked silence that must always mark the passing of a great man. Countess Sashenka gently placed his head on a pillow, then raised her hands to her face and fell back in a dead faint. Some wept loudly; some knelt to pray, raising their hands to the heavens; some hugged and consoled each other; the doctors stared at the patient they had failed to save; others just peered at his face with its single open eye. To the left and right, groups of Moldavian boyars or merchants sat watching while a Cossack tried to control a rearing horse, which perhaps sensed how ‘the earthly globe was shaken’ by this ‘untimely, sudden passing!’.²⁰ The soldiers and Cossacks, veterans of Potemkin’s wars, were sobbing, one and all. They had not even had time to finish building their master’s tent.

So died one of Europe’s most famous statesmen. Contemporaries, while admitting his contrasts and eccentricities, rated him highly. All visitors to Russia had wished to meet this force of nature. He was always – by pure power of personality – the centre of attention: ‘When absent, he alone was the subject of conversation; when present he engaged every eye.’²¹ When they did meet him, no one was disappointed. Jeremy Bentham, the English philosopher who stayed on his estates, called him ‘Prince of Princes’.²²

The Prince de Ligne, who knew all the titans of his time, from Frederick the Great to Napoleon, best described Potemkin as ‘the most extraordinary man I ever met…dull in the midst of pleasure; unhappy for being too lucky; surfeited with everything, easily disgusted, morose, inconstant, a profound philosopher, an able minister, a sublime politician or like a child of ten years old…What is the secret of his magic? Genius, genius and still more genius; natural abilities, an excellent memory, much elevation of soul; malice without the design of injuring, artifice without craft…the art of conquering every heart in his good moments, much generosity…refined taste – and a consummate knowledge of mankind.’²³ The Comte de Ségur, who knew Napoleon and George Washington, said that ‘of all the personalities, the one that struck me the most, and which was the most important for me to know well, was the famous Prince Potemkin. His entire personality was the most original because of an inconceivable mixture of grandeur and pettiness, laziness and activity, ambition and insouciance. Such a man would have been remarkable by his originality anywhere.’ Lewis Littlepage, an American visitor, wrote that the ‘astonishing’ Serenissimus was more powerful in Russia than Cardinal Wolsey, Count-Duke of Olivares and Cardinal Richelieu had ever been in their native kingdoms.²⁴

Alexander Pushkin, who was born eight years after this death on the Bessarabian steppe, was fascinated by Potemkin, interviewed his ageing nieces about him and recorded their stories: the Prince, he often said, ‘was touched by the hand of history’. In their flamboyance and quintessential Russianness, the two complemented each other.²⁵ Twenty years later, Lord Byron was still writing about the man he called ‘the spoiled child of the night.’²⁶

Russian tradition dictated that the dead man’s eyes must be closed and coins placed on them. The orbs of the great should be sealed with gold pieces. Potemkin was ‘richer than some kings’ but, like many of the very rich, he never carried any money. None of the magnates in his entourage had any either. There must have been an awkward moment of searching pockets, tapping jackets, summoning valets: nothing. So someone called over to the soldiers.

The grizzled Cossack who had observed Potemkin’s death throes produced a five-kopeck piece. So the Prince had his eye closed with a humble copper coin. The incongruity of the death passed immediately into legend. Perhaps it was the same old Cossack who now stepped back and muttered: ‘Lived on gold; died on grass.’

This bon mot entered the mythology of princesses and common soldiers: few years later, the painter Elisabeth Vigée Lebrun asked a gnarled princess in St Petersburg about Potemkin’s death: ‘Alas, my darling, this great Prince, who had so many diamonds and such gold, died on the grass!’, replied the dowager, as if he had had the bad taste to expire on one of her lawns.²⁷ During the Napoleonic Wars, the Russian army marched singing songs of Potemkin’s death ‘on the steppe lying on a raincoat’.²⁸ The poet Derzhavin saw the romance in the death of this unbounded man in the natural wilderness, ‘like mist upon a crossroads’.²⁹ Two observers at different ends of the Empire – Count Fyodor Rostopchin (famous as the man who, in 1812, burned Moscow) in nearby Jassy, and the Swedish envoy, Count Curt Stedingk, in faraway Petersburg³⁰ – reacted with exactly the same words: ‘His death was as extraordinary as his life.’³¹

—

The Empress had to be told at once. Sashenka Branicka could have told her – she was already reporting to Catherine on the Prince’s health – but she was too distraught. So an adjutant was sent galloping ahead to inform Potemkin’s devoted and indefatigable secretary Vasily Popov.

There was one last, almost ritual, moment. As the melancholy convoy began to retrace its footsteps back to Jassy, someone must have wanted to mark the spot where the Prince died so that they could build a monument to recall his glory. There were no rocks. Branches would blow away. It was then that the Ataman (Cossack General) Pavel Golavaty, who had known Potemkin for thirty years, commandeered the Zaporogian lance of one of his horsemen. Before he joined the rearguard of the procession, he rode to the little plateau and plunged the lance into the ground at the very spot.³² A Cossack lance to mark the place of Potemkin was as characteristic as the arrow that Robin Hood was supposed to have used to select his grave.

Meanwhile, Popov received the news and, at once, wrote to the Empress: ‘We have been struck a blow! Most Merciful Sovereign, Most Serene Prince Grigory Alexandrovich is no more among the living.’³³ Popov despatched the letter with a trusted young officer who was ordered not to rest until he had delivered the terrible news.

Seven days later, at 6 p.m. on 12 October,³⁴ this courier, dressed respectfully in black – and the dust of the road – delivered Popov’s letter to the Winter Palace. The Empress fainted away. Her courtiers thought she had suffered a stroke. Her doctors were called to bleed her. ‘Tears and desperation’ is how Alexander Khrapovitsky, Catherine’s private secretary, described her shock. ‘At eight, they let blood, at ten she went to bed.’³⁵ She was in a state of collapse: even her grandchildren were not admitted. ‘It was not the lover she regretted,’ wrote a Swiss imperial tutor, who understood their relationship. ‘It was the friend.’³⁶ She could not sleep. At 2 a.m., she rose again to write to her loyal and fussy confidant, the philosophe Friedrich Melchior Grimm: ‘A terrible death-blow has just fallen on my head. At six in the afternoon, a messenger brought the tragic news that my pupil, my friend, almost my idol, Prince Potemkin of Taurida, has died in Moldavia after about a month’s illness. You cannot imagine how broken I am…’.³⁷

In many ways, the Empress never recovered. The golden age of her reign died with him. But so did his reputation: Catherine told Grimm on that tragic sleepless night, scribbling by candlelight in her Winter Palace apartments, that Potemkin’s achievements had always confounded the jealous ‘babblers’. But if his enemies could not defeat him in life, they have succeeded in death. He was barely cold before a vicious legend grew up around his outlandish character that was to obscure his achievements for 200 years.

Catherine would be amazed and appalled to discover that today her ‘idol’ and ‘statesman’ is best known for a calumny and a film. He is remembered for the historical libel of the ‘Potemkin Villages’, while he really built cities, and for the film Battleship Potemkin, the story of the mutinous sailors who heralded the revolutions that, long after his death, destroyed the Russia he loved. So the Potemkin legend was created by Russia’s national enemies, jealous courtiers and Catherine’s unstable successor, Paul I, who avenged himself, not just on the reputation, but even the bones, of his mother’s lover. In the nineteenth century, the Romanovs, who presided over a rigid militaristic bureaucracy with its own Victorian primness, fed off the glories of Catherine but were embarrassed by her private life, especially by the role of the ‘demi-Tsar’ Potemkin.³⁸ Their Soviet successors shared their scruples while expanding their lies (though it has recently emerged that Stalin,*2 that avid student of history, privately admired Potemkin). Even the most distinguished Western historians still treat him more as a debauched clown and sexual athlete than historical statesman.*3 All these strands came together to ensure that the Prince has not received his rightful place in history. Catherine the Great, ignorant of the calumnies to come, mourned her friend, lover, soldier, statesman and probably husband for the remaining years of her life.

On 12 January 1792, Vasily Popov, the Prince’s factotum arrived back in St Petersburg with a special mission. He carried Potemkin’s most cherished treasures – Catherine’s secret letters of love and state. They remained tied up in bundles. Some of them were – and still are – stained by the dying Potemkin’s tears as he read, and re-read them, in the knowledge that he would never set eyes on Catherine again.

The Empress received Popov. He handed over the letters. She dismissed everyone except Popov and locked the door. Then the two of them wept together.³⁹ It was almost thirty years since she first met Potemkin on the very day she seized power and became Empress of all the Russias.

Skip Notes

*1 ‘Here lies Bauer under this stone, Coachman, drive on!’

*2 ‘What was the genius of Catherine the Great?’ asked Stalin during a famous discussion about history with his favourite henchman, Andrei Zhdanov, in the summer of 1934. Stalin answered his own question thus: ‘Her greatness lay in her choice of Prince Potemkin and other such talented lovers and officials to govern the State.’ This author discovered this story during the research for his book, Stalin: the Court of the Red Tsar: he interviewed Yury Zhdanov, son of Andrei and later the dictator’s son-in-law, now in his eighties, who, as a boy, witnessed the scene.

*3 Writing in 1994, for example, one highly respected Professor of History at Cambridge University evaluates Potemkin’s political and military abilities, with the amusing but completely unjustifiable claim that he ‘lacked self-confidence anywhere outside the bedroom.’

PART ONE

Potemkin and Catherine

1739–1762

1

THE PROVINCIAL BOY

I would rather hear that you had been killed than that you had brought shame on yourself.

(The advice of a Smolensk nobleman to his son, joining the army.)

L. N. Engelhardt, Memoirs

‘When I grow up,’ the young Potemkin is said to have boasted, ‘I shall be either a statesman or an archbishop.’ His schoolfriends probably mocked his dreams, for he was born into the ranks of respectable provincial gentry without the benefits of either name or fortune. His godfather, who understood him better, liked to mutter that the boy would either ‘rise to great honour – or lose his head’.¹ The only way to rise swiftly to such eminence in the Russia of that time was through the favour of the monarch – and by the time he had reached the age of twenty-two this obscure provincial had contrived to meet two reigning empresses.

Grigory Alexandrovich Potemkin was born on 30 September 1739*1 in the small village of Chizhova, not far from the old fortress city of Holy Smolensk. The Potemkins owned the modest estate and its 430 male serfs. The family were far from rich, but they were hardly poor either. However, they made up for their middling status by behaviour that was strange even by the standards of