Catherine the Great & Potemkin

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  Potemkin’s campaign intensified after the conquest of the Crimea – and, using a burgeoning network of middlemen, he extended it to the whole of Europe. The population of the Crimea had been halved throughout its troubles to about 50,000 males.103 The Prince believed that the territories boasted only 10 per cent of the populations they should contain. ‘I am using all my powers,’ he told Catherine. ‘From diverse places, I have summoned colonists knowledgeable in all spheres of the economy…’. He wielded his massive powers to decide who should and should not be taxed and how much land settlers, whether noblemen or foreigners, should receive. Immigrants were usually freed from taxes for a year and a half, later raised to six years.104

  The agents were paid 5 roubles per settler. ‘I have found a man who is charged to bring foreign colonists to the Crimea,’ one of them wrote the Prince. ‘I’ve agreed with him to pay thirty roubles per family delivered in those places.’ Later he sent Potemkin another agent with whom ‘I’ve agreed 200 souls but he promises he can bring considerably more.’105

  The peasants of southern Europe were particularly fertile ground. In 1782, sixty-one Corsican families arrived to be settled near Kherson.106 In early 1783, Potemkin was making arrangements to receive Corsicans and Jews recruited by the Duc de Crillon. But the Prince decided, ‘I do not consider it necessary to increase the number of these inhabitants except those already sent by Count Mocenigo’ (who was the Russian minister in Florence). In the Prince’s archives, we can follow this strange trade in honest farmers and opportunistic rascals. Some wrote directly to the Prince’s Chancellery. In a typical letter, potential Greek settlers, named Panaio and Alexiano, asked to bring their family from ‘the Archipelago’ so that they ‘can all come to make a colony bigger than that made with the Corsicans.’107 Some of the agents were the worst sort of fairground hucksters: how many innocents did they gull? One suspects that landowners saw this as a convenient way to rid their estates of rogues. Potemkin did not mind. ‘They will be transported to Kherson,’ he wrote, ‘where everything is ready to receive them.’108

  The Prince also managed to attract the most industrious, sober settlers any empire-builder could wish for: the Mennonites of Danzig, who asked for the right to have their own churches and no taxes for ten years. Potemkin’s agent George Trappe gave them their terms – they would receive money for travel and houses when they arrived. The privileges were granted. Potemkin’s letter to his Scottish banker, Richard Sutherland, shows how the chief minister of the Empire personally arranged the details of moving relatively small numbers of people across Europe: ‘Monsieur, As Her Imperial Majesty has deigned to accord privileges to the Mennonites who wish to come to settle in the Government of Ekaterinoslav…be so good as to prepare the necessary sums, in Danzig, Riga and Kherson, for their voyage and settlement…Following the mercy that Her Imperial Majesty had deigned to grant to these good farmers, I trust there will be no obstacle in delivering the sums…to prevent their settlement in Ekaterinoslav.’109 There are many such unpublished letters in the archives. The 228 families, probably 2,000 people, set off on their long journey to found eight colonies in early 1790.110

  At the same time, over in Kherson, he was ordering the incompetent Colonel Gaks to welcome a party of Swedes for the Swedish settlement, ‘where they will find not only houses…For foodstuffs, give five roubles to everyone.’111 Another 880 Swedes were settled in the new city of Ekaterinoslav. Thousands of Moldavians and Wallachians, Orthodox Rumanians under Ottoman rule, also flocked across the borders. By 1782, some 23,000 had arrived. Many lived in Elisabethgrad, where they outnumbered Russians. ‘A Greek of Bulgaria’, reads a typical letter to Potemkin from one of his agents in 1785, ‘has told me there are a number of Moldavians on the frontiers of Moldavia – it would be easy to persuade them all to come as immigrants.’ No doubt they came.112

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  Almost uniquely among Russian soldiers and statesmen, Potemkin was more than just tolerant of Jews: he studied their culture, enjoyed the company of their rabbis, and became their champion. The Enlightenment had already changed attitudes to Jews. Empress Elisabeth had banned all these ‘enemies of Christ’ from the Empire in 1742. Maria Theresa hated Jews so much that, as late as 1777, when Potemkin was giving them privileges for settlement, she wrote: ‘I know of no greater plague than this race.’ She could not bear to set eyes on a Jew: she spoke to her banker Diego d’Aguilar from behind a screen. But her son Joseph II greatly improved their lot.113 When Catherine usurped the throne, playing the Orthodox card, she was in no position to favour the Jews. Her October 1762 decree invited all settlers ‘except Jews’, but she secretly let them in by ordering Count Browne, her Irish Governor-General of Livonia, specifically not to ask the religion of potential settlers.114

  The Partition of Poland in 1772 brought large numbers of Jews – about 45,000 – into Russia for the first time. Potemkin first encountered the many who lived on his Krichev estate in ex-Polish lands. When the Prince invited settlers to the south as early as 1775, he added the rare coda: ‘even Jews’. On 30 September 1777, he set the policy: Jews were allowed to settle in his lands, sometimes in ‘the empty smallholdings left by Zaporogian Cossacks’, providing they brought five Polish settlers each and money to invest. Later he made this more appetizing: no taxes for seven years and the right to trade in wines and spirits; they would be protected from marauding soldiers; have their disputes adjudicated by rabbis; be permitted synagogues, graveyards and the right to import their wives from Jewish communities in Poland. These immigrants were useful: apart from commerce, brickmaking, which Potemkin needed for his new towns, was a Jewish trade. Soon Kherson and Ekaterinoslav, melting-pots of Cossacks, raskolniki and Greeks, were at least partly Jewish towns.115

  Serenissimus became especially friendly with Joshua Zeitlin, a remarkable Jewish merchant, and Hebraic scholar, who travelled with the Prince, managed his estates, built towns, arranged financial deals for supplying his armies, and even ran the restored mint at Kaffa in the Crimea – he appears throughout the archives. Zeitlin ‘walked with Potemkin like a brother and friend’ – a relationship unique in Russian history because the Jew remained proudly unassimilated, steeped in rabbinical learning and piety, yet standing near the top of the Prince’s entourage. Potemkin promoted him to the rank of ‘Court advisor,’ thereby giving him noble status and allowing him to own serfs and estates. Russian Jews called Zeitlin, ‘Ha-sar’ – Lord. The Prince enjoyed Zeitlin’s ability to do business as well as discuss Talmudic theology and they were often together. As the two inspected new roads and towns, Zeitlin ‘would ride on a majestic horse alongside Potemkin.’ While the Prince accepted petitions, the noble and plutocratic rabbi ‘would accept halakhic queries from…scholars. He would get down from his horse and compose halakhic responses in a kneeling position,’ and then remount and ride on with Serenissimus. It is hard to overstate what an astonishing vision of tolerance this was, not merely for Russia, but for Europe.

  Potemkin helped the Jews and repeatedly intervened to defend them. During Catherine’s visit to the south in 1787, he even sponsored the delegation, led by Zeitlin, that petitioned her to stop Jews being called ‘zhidy’ – ‘Yids.’ Catherine received them and decreed that henceforth they should be called ‘evrei’ – ‘Hebrews’. When Zeitlin clashed with the Prince’s banker, Sutherland, Potemkin even backed his beloved Jews against his beloved British.116 A variety of Jewish rabbis soon joined Zeitlin in Potemkin’s bizarre court of mullahs and priests. It was this peculiar tolerance that led his anti-Semitic noble critics to sneer that the Prince favoured any foreigners with ‘a big snout’ – but Potemkin was never bound by the prejudices of others.117

  No wonder the Prince became a Jewish hero. Wherever he went, particularly in Belorussia, crowds of excited Jews prepared such elaborate welcomes that they sometimes irritated him. They would offer him ‘big trays of silver, bread, salt and lemons’, which Miranda, who o
bserved these rituals in Kherson, drily described as ‘doubtless some kind of hospitality ceremony’.118

  On Potemkin’s death, Zeitlin retired to his sumptuous palace at Ustye in Belorussia, where this unusual financier patronized Jewish learning in his Hebraic library and synagogue, conducted scientific experiments in his laboratory, and held his own court, with the eccentricity and magnificence of a Jewish Potemkin. The position of Russian Jews again deteriorated. They were never again to have such an eminent protector.119

  Next, the Prince had the idea of importing British convicts to settle the Crimea.

  Skip Notes

  *1 When this author visited Kherson, it was still infested with insects: the bed and ceiling in its main hotel so teemed with mosquitoes that the white of the sheets and the paint were literally blackened.

  *2 The centre of the town is still mainly as Potemkin planned it. The fortress has been destroyed: only its two gate forts remain. The huge well, possibly the one Potemkin ordered Colonel Gaks to construct, remains covered by a grid. During the Second World War, Nazis threw executed Russians down it when they retreated. Potemkin’s immense Palace survived until 1922. The curving arsenal, the mint, admiralty and above all St Catherine’s Church remain. The church, with its sandy-coloured stone, its pillars and its noble Starov dome, was once used as a museum of atheism to display the decaying bodies of those buried in its graveyard, but is once again used as a church. Korsakov the engineer is buried in its churchyard. And the proudest boast of its priest and parishioners is that Potemkin its builder rests there beneath the church floor – see Epilogue.

  *3 The author had heard the legend that the icons were by V.L. Borovikovsky and showed a saintly Potemkin and Catherine. The priest in the church had never heard it. It emerged that the icons from the church were stored in the Kherson Art Museum, where they are attributed to Mikhail Shibanov. Potemkin the dragon-slayer is instantly recognizable.

  *4 Still a closed naval city, it is now shared by the Black Sea Fleets of Ukraine and Russia. None of Potemkin’s original buildings survived the Anglo-French siege of the Crimean War and the Nazi siege of the Second World War. But there is a monument just above the port – crowded and grey with battleships – that reads: ‘Here on 3 (14) June 1783 was founded the city of Sebastopol – the sea fortress of south Russia.’

  *5 Dniepropetrovsk was noted in the Soviet era for providing the USSR with its clique of leaders in the 1970s. In 1938, a thirty-two-year-old Communist apparatchik named Leonid Brezhnev stepped over the corpses of his liquidated superiors in the midst of Stalin’s Great Purge to become chief of propaganda in Dniepropetrovsk. There he gathered together the cronies who were dominate the Soviet Union in 1964–80: the ‘Dniepropetrovsk Mafia’. Locals today recall that Brezhnev especially enjoyed entertaining in the Potemkin Palace.

  *6 Today Deribas is one of Odessa’s most elegant boulevards.

  *7 In Kherson today, on the site of the first docks stands a hideous concrete Soviet sculpture of a sailing ship. Its inscription of course does not mention Potemkin but it acclaims him nonetheless. ‘Here in 1783’, it reads, ‘was launched the first 66-gun ship-of-the-line of the Black Sea Fleet – “Glory of Catherine”.’

  *8 These worshipped, according to the old rites of Orthodoxy. They had been excluded from mainstream Russian life for a century, often living in remote Siberian settlements to worship freely. Fascinated by their faith, Potemkin protected and tolerated them.

  19

  BRITISH BLACKAMOORS AND CHECHEN WARRIORS

  But I not rising until noontime

  Drink coffee and enjoy a smoke;

  I make vacations of my workdays

  And spin my thoughts in chimeras

  Gavrili Derzhavin, ‘Ode to Princess Felitsa’

  Serenissimus heard that the American War was preventing Britain from transporting its convicts to the Colonies and he saw an opportunity. His friend the Prince de Ligne was probably the source of this information, because Joseph II had considered settling them in Galicia and then decided against it. One day, Simon Vorontsov, now ambassador in London, was visited by an Irish adventurer named Dillon, who claimed that Ligne had assigned him to procure ‘delinquents…and blackamoors’ to settle in the Crimea. Vorontsov, who disliked Potemkin, was appalled at the possible ‘shame of Russia: all of Europe will get to know what kind of monsters were settled’. Their dissipation would make them ill and they would have to maintain themselves with their ‘old profession – robbery and swindles’.*1

  In October 1785, Vorontsov was amazed to receive an imperial order, via Bezborodko, to negotiate the sending of these British criminals to Riga for transport to the Crimea. The British Government was to pay for their journey. Vorontsov saw a chance to undermine Potemkin, so he wrote to the Empress warning of the effect on her European reputation. ‘Despite the prodigious influence and power of Prince Potemkin’, boasted Vorontsov, the Empress decided he was right – it might damage her image in Europe. ‘It is true’, trumpeted Vorontsov years later, ‘that Prince Potemkin never forgave me.’1

  This story was propagated by Vorontsov – and has been repeated ever since – to show Potemkin’s clownish incompetence and lack of judgement. However, it was not a foolish or disgusting idea. Most of these ‘delinquents’ were not hardened criminals – this was a time when unfortunates were deported from England in chains on grisly prison-ships for stealing a handkerchief or poaching a rabbit. The ultimate penal colony, Australia, which was to become the destination of these very convicts, has flourished. The Empress, Ligne and Bezborodko, none of them fools, supported Potemkin’s idea. Besides, it was a familiar concept because many Russian criminals were sent to Siberia as ‘settlers’.

  Some of the settlers were already semi-criminals anyway. In 1784, a shipload of what Samuel Bentham called ‘ragamuffin Italians’, mainly Corsicans, arrived from Leghorn. They had mutinied on the way, killing their captain, but were captured and brought to Kherson, where they were put to work building the town. Out of this débâcle comes a story that speaks for itself. There was an Englishman among these cut-throats – there is always an Englishman in Potemkin’s schemes. Since he was said to be a coal-miner, he was ordered to search for coal. Bentham found him ‘almost naked and living on five kopeks per day’, so he mentioned his miserable compatriot to the Prince, who ‘promised him a good salary, and when I said he was almost naked, he ordered me to give him 300 roubles to buy clothes. This, I think, proves no small degree of generosity – as well as a favourable disposition towards us English.’2

  There is a revealing American postscript. In 1784, Americans loyal to the British Crown, who had to leave the United States, petitioned Potemkin to be welcomed as settlers. Potemkin worried that ‘they may be the descendants of those people who migrated from England during the civil wars in the last century and who may be supposed to entertain opinions by no means compatible with the spirit of [Russia]’.3 So British criminals were sought, respectable American loyalists rejected. But Potemkin, who regarded Cromwell, Danton and Pugachev as much the same, was being consistent: political rebellion was much more dangerous than mere crime.

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  Serenissimus specified to his governors precisely how these settlers were to be welcomed at the end of their long journeys. ‘The new subjects who don’t know our language or customs demand defence and protection…’, he told his Crimean Governor Kahovsky. The Prince certainly decided the settlers’ destinies on a whim: ‘I offered to settle them on the left bank of the Dnieper. But now I think it would be easier to move them into the empty Greek lands in Taurida itself where there are already buildings.’4 He was constantly thinking of ways to improve their lot: ‘Be so kind as to distribute bullocks, cows and horses, left behind by departing Taurida Tartars, among the new settlers,’ he ordered Kahovsky, ‘trying, not merely to be equable
, but to help the poor.’5 To the Governor of Ekaterinoslav, Sinelnikov, he commanded each family to receive the same plus eight desyatins of land per head. ‘A further 40 families are now coming down the Dnieper; do not fail to receive them yourself…’.6 Again, this personal greeting by a busy governor sounds more like touchy-feely modern welfare than military settlement on Russian steppes.

  Potemkin is often accused of abandoning these people to their fates. He could not see everything and his officials frequently lied to him. This was the reason he was perennially on the road – to ensure nothing was concealed from him. Nonetheless there must have been thousands of little miseries for some of these people. The departure of some of the settlers from the Crimea ‘proves their unhappiness’, Potemkin wrote to Kahovsky. ‘Understand the reasons for it and carry out your duties with firmness, satisfying the offended.’7 His military order to ‘understand’ demonstrates the contradiction of trying to foster psychological sensitivity by military command.

  However, many others settled happily. The archives prove that, whenever Potemkin found a lapse, he reacted immediately, like the note to Kahovsky in which he suggested five ways to overcome the villagers’ ‘great privations’ because the state had failed to provide enough cattle: ‘Only three pairs of oxen, one plough and one cart have been given to four or even more families…‘.8 It is remarkable to find the co-ruler of an empire actually ordering his generals to correct such a mistake and give a certain number of oxen to a specific peasant family in one village. That is what happened again and again.