Catherine the Great & Potemkin

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  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.’