Catherine the Great & Potemkin

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  There was one touching moment, after Stanislas-Augustus awkwardly awarded Potemkin’s nephew, Engelhardt, the White Eagle. It was time for dinner. The King looked for his hat. Catherine handed it to him. ‘To cover my head twice,’ he quipped – the first being his crown. ‘Ah, madame, that is too much bounty and goodness.’ Stanislas-Augustus rested on another barge, then was rowed to Potemkin’s floating residence. Serenissimus tried to reconcile the King with Branicki, but the latter behaved so insolently that Stanislas-Augustus left the room. Potemkin rushed after him, apologizing. The Empress and the Prince sharply reprimanded Branicki – but he was family: their Polish creature remained in their entourage.

  At 6 p.m., the King returned to Catherine’s barge for the political negotiations. He proposed the Russo-Polish alliance, strolling on deck. She promised an answer. The Prince himself nonchalantly played cards near by. Catherine was furious that he did not come to her assistance. ‘Why did Prince Potemkin and you have to leave us all the time like that?’, she berated Ligne. Stanislas-Augustus begged Catherine to come for supper in Kaniev, where he had almost bankrupted his meagre resources by laying on two days of dinners and fireworks, but Catherine snubbed him. She told Potemkin she did not care to do things in a rush as they did in Poland; ‘you yourself know any change of my intentions is unpleasant for me’. Potemkin, whether out of respect for Stanislas-Augustus or out of anger with Catherine for ruining his Polish strategy, kept playing cards and saying nothing. Catherine became angrier and quieter. The King got glummer. The courtiers fidgeted and eavesdropped. ‘Prince Potemkin didn’t say a word,’ Catherine muttered to her secretary the next day. ‘I had to talk all the time; my tongue dried up; they almost made me angry by asking me to stay.’ Catherine finally deigned to watch Poland’s costly fireworks from her barge.

  The broken-hearted and humiliated King took his leave. ‘Don’t look so distressed,’ Ligne whispered to him bitchily. ‘You’re only giving pleasure to a Court which…detests you.’ Catherine remained furious with Potemkin. He sulked on the Bug. She sent him a series of notes: ‘I’m angry with you, you’re horribly maladroit today.’ The flotilla waited to watch the fireworks culminating in a simulated eruption of Vesuvius. Thus the King had, in Ligne’s inimitable description, ‘been here for three months and spent three million to see the Empress for three hours’. Stanislas-Augustus sent this pathetic note in a semi-legible scrawl to Potemkin a few days later: ‘I was pleased when I saw the Empress. I don’t know her any more, but although one is sad, I count on having Prince Potemkin as a friend.’6

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  —

  Kaiser Joseph II and Tsarina Catherine II, the Caesars of the East, were getting closer. On 30 April, the flotilla rowed late into Kremenchuk, delayed by a high wind. Joseph, again in incognito as Comte de Falkenstein, waited downriver at Kaidak, bristling with military impatience.

  Joseph’s despotic but rational reforms had already driven several of his provinces into rebellion. He had not wanted to come to Russia at all, but his presence was the most important for the Russians since the Austrian alliance was their main weapon against the Ottomans. ‘Perhaps one can find time’, Joseph suggested to Chancellor Kaunitz, ‘to find an excuse.’ The pompous Habsburg thought Catherine’s invitation ‘most cavalier’ so he told Kaunitz his answer would be ‘honest, short but will not refrain from letting this Catherinized Princess of Zerbst know she should put a little more consideration…in disposing of me’. He then accepted enthusiastically. He was keen to inspect Russian military forces but, in his heart, was determined to find they could not do anything properly, unlike his Austrians. He wrote ironically to Potemkin that he looked forward to seeing his ‘interesting arrangements and surprising creations’. Now the inspector-maniac consoled himself for the wait by inspecting Kherson on his own.7

  Catherine fretted – where was Joseph? Cobenzl sent his emperor reassuring letters. Potemkin seemed to live only for the moment – though there were rumours that he was short of horses for the rest of the journey. The Empress landed at Kremenchuk and inspected an elegant palace surrounded, of course, by an ‘enchanted English garden’ of shady foliage, running water and pear trees. Potemkin had had huge oak trees, ‘as broad as himself’ joked Ligne, transported from afar and assembled into a wood. William Gould had been there. ‘Everything is in flower,’ the Empress told Grimm. Catherine then inspected 15,000 troops, including seven regiments of Potemkin’s new light cavalry, which Cobenzl acclaimed for its men and horses. After giving a ball for 800 that night, Catherine headed downriver for her imperial reunion.8

  Just as the boats disappeared down the river, Samuel Bentham, leaving brother Jeremy to manage Krichev, sailed into view with his proudest creation: the six-link state vermicular for Catherine.*1 Among so many wonderful sights, the young Englishman, high on a platform, barking orders through a trumpet, must have provided another. Potemkin ordered him to moor near his barge. Next morning, he inspected it and ‘was pleased, as can be’, according to Samuel. When the flotilla set off again, Bentham went too. He claimed the Empress noticed his vessels and admired them – but Potemkin was possibly consoling him for missing his moment.

  Twenty five miles short of Kaidak, where they were to meet the Emperor, some of the barges ran aground. The flotilla anchored. Potemkin realized they could not go all the way by river. There was a danger that the spectacular would descend into embarrassing chaos: one Empress was grounded; one Emperor was lost; there was a shortage of horses; and the barges containing the food provisions and kitchen grounded on sandbanks. Bentham’s ‘floating worm’ saved the day.

  Leaving the Empress behind, Potemkin changed boats and, to Bentham’s delight, pushed ahead in the vermicular to find the Emperor. When he got nearer Kaidak, very close to the Sech of the vanquished Zaporogians, he elected to stay on board rather than in one of his local palaces. Next morning, he went off and found Joseph II. That evening, the Emperor returned the compliment on Bentham’s vermicular. Bentham was puffed up by the praise of two Caesars and one Prince – but they were much more interested in meeting each other than in viewing ingenious English barges.*2

  Potemkin and Joseph decided that the Emperor would ‘surprise’ the Empress. Monarchs do not appreciate surprises, so Serenissimus sent a courier hotfoot to warn Catherine, and Cobenzl sent a courier back to warn Joseph that Potemkin had warned her: such are the absurdities of serving kings. On 7 May, Catherine abandoned the barges and proceeded by carriage towards this achingly unspontaneous ‘surprise’.9

  Catherine, accompanied by Ligne, Mamonov and Alexandra Branicka, crossed a field and came ‘nose to nose’ (in her words) with Joseph, who was with Cobenzl. The two Majesties, reunited in one carriage, then headed the thirty versts to Kaidak. There Joseph was appalled to discover that the kitchens and cooks were far behind on the grounded barges. Potemkin galloped off to make arrangements and forgot to eat. Now the Tsarina and Kaiser were without any hope of food. ‘There was no one’, Joseph noted, ‘to cook or serve.’ So much for the Emperor who liked to travel without ceremony. The imperial tour threatened to subside into farce.10

  Potemkin was the master of improvisation just as necessity is the father of invention. ‘Prince Potemkin himself became the chef de cuisine,’ Catherine laughingly told Grimm, ‘Prince de Nassau, the kitchen-boy, and Grand General Branicki, the pastry-maker.’ The imbroglio in the kitchen, created by a one-eyed Russian giant, an international lion-slaying paladin and a bewhiskered ‘Polish bravo’, must have been an alarming but comical glimpse of culinary Hades. Potemkin did manage to present a girandole, a revolving firework spinning round Catherine’s initial, surmounted by 4,000 rockets, and yet another exploding volcanic hill. For eighteenth-century royalty, fireworks and ersatz volcanoes must have been as boring as visits to youth centres and factories today. One wonders if it took their mind off Potemkin’s cooking: the three mad cooks had indeed spoiled the broth. Catherine thought ‘the two Majesties had n
ever been so grandly and badly served’ but it was such fun that it was ‘as good a dinner as it was bad’. One person – the most important – did not agree.

  ‘The dinner was constructed of uneatable dishes,’ the unamused Emperor told Field-Marshal Lacey, but at least ‘the company is quite good’. But the Emperor of Schadenfreude was secretly delighted – ‘the confusion that reigns on this voyage is unbelievable’. He noticed there were ‘more things and people on the boats than the carriages could contain and there aren’t horses to carry them’. Joseph, twisted with German superiority over the blundering Russians, was ‘curious how it will all succeed in the end’, but, he ended with a martyred sigh, ‘This will truly be a time of penitence.’11

  Joseph drew Ligne aside when he got the opportunity: ‘It seems to me these people want war. Are they ready? I don’t believe so; in any case, I’m not.’ He had already seen Kherson’s ships and forts. The Russians were involved in an arms race, but he believed the whole show was ‘to throw dust in our eyes. Nothing is solid and all is done in a hurry in the most expensive way.’ Joseph could not quite bring himself to admit that he was impressed. He was right if he thought the magnificence of the tour and Potemkin’s achievements were moving Catherine towards war. ‘We can start it ourselves,’ she told her secretary.

  Potemkin wanted to discuss the possibility of war with Joseph himself, so one morning he went to see the Emperor and explained Russian grievances and territorial demands against the Ottomans. Potemkin’s shyness prevented him saying all he wanted, so he asked Ligne to do it for him. ‘I didn’t know he wanted so much,’ muttered Joseph. ‘I thought taking the Crimea would suffice. But what will they do for me if I have war with Prussia one day? We’ll see…’.12

  Two days later, the two Caesars arrived, in a grand black carriage with Catherine’s crest on the doors, a leather ceiling and red velvet seats, at the desolate foundations of Potemkin’s grandiose Ekaterinoslav.*3 When the two Majesties laid the foundation stones for the cathedral, Joseph whispered to Ségur, ‘The Empress has laid the first stone, and I the last.’ (He was wrong.) The next day they headed across the steppes, stocked with ‘immense herds of sheep, huge numbers of horses’,13 towards Kherson.

  On the 12th, they entered Potemkin’s first city in a ceremonial procession through an arch emblazoned with an unmistakable challenge to the Sublime Porte: ‘This is the road to Byzantium.’14 Joseph, who had already inspected the town, now had a chance to inspect Catherine’s entourage. ‘Prince Potemkin alone, mad for music, has 120 musicians with him,’ observed the Kaiser, yet ‘it took an officer whose hands were horribly burned with gunpowder four days to get help’. As for the Empress’s favourite, Joseph thought Mamonov was ‘barely intelligent…a mere child’. He liked Ségur, thought Fitzherbert was ‘clever’ though clearly bored, and praised the ‘jockey diplomatique’, who possessed of all the wit and joie de vivre the Emperor lacked: ‘Ligne is marvellous here and counts well for my interests.’ But Joseph’s peripatetic inspections and secret jealousy were not lost on the Russians. Catherine rolled her eyes at her secretary: ‘I see and hear everything but I don’t run around like the Emperor does.’ It was no wonder, she thought, he had driven the burghers of Brabant and Flanders to rebel.15

  Ségur and Ligne were dazzled by Potemkin’s achievements there: ‘we could not have prevented our plain astonishment’, wrote Ségur, ‘to see such great new imposing creations’. The fortress was almost finished; there were houses for 24,000; ‘several churches of noble architecture’; there were 600 cannons in the Arsenal; 200 merchant ships in the port and two ships-of-the-line and a frigate, ready to launch. The surprise in Catherine’s entourage was due to the probably almost universal presumption in Petersburg that Potemkin’s achievements were fraudulent. Now Ségur said they all recognized the ‘talent and activity of Prince Potemkin’. Catherine herself, who had evidently been told by Potemkin’s enemies that it was all lies, told Grimm, ‘They can say all they like in St Petersburg – the attentions of Prince Potemkin have transformed this land which, at the peace [1774] was not more than a hut, into a flourishing town.’ The foreigners realized the port’s limitations – ‘they’ve built a lot at Kherson in the short time since its foundation’, wrote Joseph, ‘– and it shows.’

  On the 15th, Catherine and Joseph launched the three warships from three seaside canopies decorated with ‘gauze, laces, furbelows, garlands, pearls and flowers’, which Ligne thought looked as if ‘they had just come from the milliners’ shops in the rue St Honoré’. One of the ships-of-the-line with eighty guns was named St Joseph in the Kaiser’s honour, but he thought the ‘wood is so green…the masts so bad’ that they would soon fall to pieces. They did not.16

  Before they departed, there was an ominous moment when Catherine decided she wanted to visit her strategic fortress of Kinburn at the mouth of the Dnieper. But an Ottoman squadron cruised the Liman, so the Empress could not go. The Russians were more aware of Turkish eyes watching them than they let on to foreigners. The Russian Ambassador to the Sublime Porte, Yakov Bulgakov, sailed from Constantinople to discuss Turkish policy. Potemkin teased Ségur about the French encouraging the Turks, who had ‘good reason to worry’.17

  After Kherson, the two Caesars headed across the bare steppe towards the Crimea. When Ségur rashly joked about the deserts, Catherine snapped: ‘Why put yourself out Monsieur le Comte. If you fear the boredom of deserts, what prevents you leaving for Paris?’18

  Suddenly the imperial carriage was surrounded by 3,000 Don Cossacks in full regalia, led by their Ataman, in a single row, ready to charge. Among them, there was a squadron of another of Potemkin’s favourite steppe horsemen: the ferocious Kalmyks, ‘resembling Chinese’ thought Nassau. The Cossacks charged and charged again, giving warlike whoops that thrilled Potemkin’s guests. Then they split into two halves and fought a battle. Even Joseph was impressed with their force and endurance: they could do sixty versts a day. ‘There’s no other cavalry in Europe’, said Nassau, ‘who can do it.’

  At Kizikerman,*4 seventy-five versts north-east of Kherson, they came upon a small stone house and an encampment of tents braided with silver, the carpets sprinkled with precious gems. When the Cossack officers were presented to the Empress next morning by Alexandra Branicka, the diplomats were excited by the Ataman’s women: his wife wore a long dress like a priest’s habit, made of ‘a brocade of gold and money’. She wore a sable hat with its base covered in pearls. But Nassau was most taken with the ‘four fingers of pearls’ that dangled erotically over her cheeks, all the way down to her mouth.19

  At dusk, Joseph and Ségur walked out into the flat, apparently endless wasteland, nothing but grass all the way to the horizon. ‘What a peculiar land,’ said the Holy Roman Emperor. ‘And who could have expected to see me with Catherine the Second and the French and English Ambassadors wandering through a Tartar desert? What a page of history!’

  ‘It’s more like a page from the Arabian Nights,’ replied Ségur.

  Then Joseph stopped and rubbed his eyes: ‘I don’t know if I’m awake or whether your remark about the Arabian Nights has made me dream. Look over there!’

  A tall tent appeared to be moving towards them, gliding all on its own over the grass. Kaiser and Count peered at this magical sight: it was an encampment of Kalmyks who moved their tents without dismantling them. Thirty Kalmyks came out and surrounded the two men, with no idea that one of them was an emperor. Ségur went inside. Joseph preferred to wait outside. When Ségur finally emerged, Joseph joked that he was relieved the Frenchman had been released from his ‘imprisonment’.20

  The Caesars had no sooner passed the Perekop Lines into the Crimea than there was a roar of hooves and a cloud of dust through which galloped 1,200 Tartar cavalry. Potemkin’s ‘Tartar ambuscade’ surrounded the imperial conveyance completely, armed with jewel-encrusted pistols, engraved curved daggers, lances and bows and arrows, as if the travellers had suddenl
y passed backwards into Europe’s dark past.

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  ‘Wouldn’t it cause uproar in Europe, my dear Ségur,’ said Ligne, ‘if the 1200 Tartars surrounding us decided to gallop us to a small port near by and there embark the noble Catherine and the great Roman Emperor and take them to Constantinople for the amusement and satisfaction of Abdul-Hamid?’ Luckily Catherine did not overhear Ligne’s musings. A guard of Tartar murzas, sporting green uniforms richly braided with golden stripes, now formed Catherine’s personal escort. Twelve Tartar boys served as her pages.21

  The carriages and Tartar horsemen seemed to be going faster and faster. They had turned down the steep hill that led to the ancient capital of the Giray Khans: Bakhchisaray. The horses on Catherine and Joseph’s eight-seater carriage bolted down the hill. It careered off the road, veering dangerously between rocks. The Tartars galloping alongside tried to get control of it. Catherine showed no fear. The Tartars somehow managed to calm the horses, for they stopped, as suddenly as they had bolted, in the Crimean capital.22

  The Khan’s Palace was an eclectic compound of palace, harem and mosque, built by Ukrainian slaves, to the plans of Persian and Italian architects, in Moorish, Arabian, Chinese and Turkish styles, with peculiar Western touches like Gothic chimneys. Its layout was based on the Ottoman palaces of Constantinople, with their gates and courtyards leading inwards into the Khan’s residence and his harem. Its courtyards were silent and serene. Towering walls surrounded secret gardens, soothed by the trickle of elaborate fountains. The hints of Western influence and the thickness of the walls reminded Joseph of a closed Carmelite convent. Beside the khans’ mosque, with its high minarets, stood the haunting, noble graveyard of the Giray dynasty: two octagonal rotundas were built around the mausoleums of khans in a field of intricately carved gravestones. Sweet scents rose from burning candles beneath the windows. Around the Palace stood a Tartar town with its baths and minarets, in a valley wedged between two sheer cliffs of rock.*5 Potemkin had covered these with burning lanterns so that the travellers really felt they resided in a mythical Arabian palace in the middle of an illuminated amphitheatre.23