Catherine the Great & Potemkin

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  Apart from Peter the Great himself, Potemkin was Russia’s first commander-in-chief of both military and naval forces across several different theatres of war. As war minister, he was responsible for all fronts, from the Swedish and Chinese borders to those of Poland and Persia. There were two main armies facing the Turks. The Prince commanded the main Ekaterinoslav Army in the centre while Field-Marshal Rumiantsev-Zadunaisky commanded the smaller Ukraine Army that covered him in the west on the Moldavian border. In addition, Potemkin was his own grand admiral of the Black Sea Fleet. In the Caucasus and the Kuban, he commanded the corps fighting both the Ottomans and the Chechen and Circassian tribes led by Sheikh Mansour. None of these forces were complete or fully prepared – though fortunately this was equally true of the Turks. Potemkin amassed his forces and waited for the two out of every 500 levy from the interior to raise 60,000 new recruits. Furthermore he was in charge of co-ordinating operations with his Austrian allies and increasingly, of Russian policy in Poland. It was a gigantic command that required, not only the ability to supply these forces and co-ordinate land and sea operations, but also sweeping strategic vision.

  The prime Ottoman aim was to recover the Crimea, using the powerful fortress of Ochakov as their base. They first had to take Potemkin’s city of Kherson. The key to Kherson was Kinburn, the small Russian fortress on the end of a spit at the mouth of the Liman, the long estuary of the Dnieper river. Potemkin energetically ordered defensive measures. Forces were sent to Kinburn under Potemkin’s best general, Alexander Suvorov. On 14 September, the Turks tried to land at Kinburn but were repelled. The Prince ordered the Black Sea Fleet to put to sea from Sebastopol to hunt the Ottoman fleet, said to be at Varna.46 Yet Potemkin’s fever and depression undermined his strength. ‘The illness makes me weaker every day,’ he confided in Catherine. If he did not recover, let her give the command to Rumiantsev.47

  ‘God forbid to hear you are so sick and weak as to pass the command to Rumiantsev,’ Catherine replied on 6 September. ‘You’re on my mind day and night…It’s God I ask and pray to save you alive and unharmed – how necessary you are both for me and the Empire, you know that.’ She agreed that they had to act defensively until the spring, but they worried whether the Turks would attack before the Russian forces were ready and whether Joseph would honour his side of their treaty.48

  Her words encouraged him. ‘You write to me like a real mother,’ he replied and gave her a strategic overview in his usual colourful turn of phrase: Suvorov in Kinburn was ‘a man who serves with his sweat and blood’ while Kahovsky in the Crimea would ‘climb astride a cannon with the same sangfroid with which he would lie on a sofa’. He advised Catherine to appease Britain and Prussia, already foreseeing their policies. Then he suggested that Russia should send its Baltic Fleet to the Mediterranean as it had during the last war. But, even as he wrote, he seemed to collapse again: he could neither sleep nor eat and was ‘very weak, millions of troubles, hypochondria too strong. Not even a minute’s rest, I’m not even sure I can stand it long.’49 His letters ceased.

  Then suddenly Potemkin’s world collapsed. He learned that the Black Sea Fleet, his beloved creation and the very arsenal of Russian power, had been destroyed in a storm on 9 September. He became almost mad. ‘I’m exhausted, Matushka,’ he wrote on the 19th. ‘I’m good for nothing…God forbid, if any losses happen, if I haven’t died of sorrow, I’ll throw my merits at your feet and hide in obscurity…let me rest, a little. Really I can’t stand any more…’. Yet he was also clear-minded and efficient – the armies were forming, manoeuvring and provisioning – and Kinburn was ready: he had done all he could but that did not help his physical and mental state.50

  ‘Lady Matushka, I’ve become unlucky,’ Potemkin, who so believed in Providence, wrote to his empress on 24 September. ‘Despite all the measures I’m taking, everything’s gone topsy-turvy. The Sebastopol Fleet has been crushed…God defeats me, not the Turks.’ His sensitive emotions dived towards the very bottom of his cyclothymic nature at the critical moment for which his entire career had been a preparation. He fell into deep despair, though historically his collapse puts him in good company: Peter the Great suffered almost suicidal emotional crises after Narva in 1700, so did Frederick the Great at both Mollwitz in 1740, whence he fled, and Hochkirch in 1758. In our century,51 the best examples of such temporary breakdowns at similarly vital moments were those suffered by Joseph Stalin, faced with the German invasion on 22 June 1941, and Yitzhak Rabin, Israeli Chief of Staff, in May 1967, planning the pre-emptive strike of the Six Day War.*8

  The Prince was in such a manic state that he confided in Rumiantsev-Zadunaisky, his old teacher,’ ‘My career is finished. I’ve almost gone mad.’ He scrawled a second note to Catherine that day, suggesting that Russian abandon the Crimea, his prize, his own title – since, without a fleet in Sebastopol, what was the point of keeping so many troops cooped up there? ‘Assign the command to someone else…’, he beseeched her. On God’s word he had always been devoted to her. But now: ‘Really I’m almost dead…’.52

  Skip Notes

  *1 Herodotus writes that the Amazons, led by their queen Penthesilea, crossed the Black Sea, fought the Scythians and then settled with them not far from the Sea of Azov. So Potemkin would have known that the Crimea was, as it were, the natural habitat of Amazons. When Potemkin took Miranda to the Crimea, they met a German colonel, Schutz, whose wife had ‘followed him in campaign dressed as a man and been injured twice – she has a bit of a manly look’. Did Frau Schutz advise on Potemkin’s Amazon Regiment? It seems a coincidence that there should be two households of Amazons in one small peninsula.

  *2 It turned out to be a Kalmyk boy called Nagu, later captured at the storming of Ochakov, to whom Ségur taught French and then managed to unload on a delighted Countess Cobenzl, back in the north.

  *3 The exact position of this ‘fairy abode’ – built on the site of the Tartar hut where Potemkin almost died in late 1783 – is now unknown. But when the author visited Beligorsk, Karasubazaar’s present name, he found a verdant spot near a river and orchard that fitted the description of the English visitor Maria Guthrie. The Tartars, deported by Stalin, have returned to the village.

  *4 Western monarchs often procured Eastern slave girls, despite their disgust for Oriental slavery. There must have been quite a traffic in these girls, who were either captured in war or bought by ambassadors to the Sublime Porte. Hence Potemkin’s offer of a girl to Ségur. Frederick the Great’s Scottish Jacobite friend Earl Marshal Keith travelled with a Turkish slave girl picked up in the Russo-Turkish Wars, and, as we will see, one of the most cultivated men of the era, King Stanislas-Augustus of Poland, was sent a regular supply.

  *5 This translates awkwardly into English but sounds better in German – ‘Potemkin der Taurier’ – and in French ‘le Taurien’, the Taurian. Catherine and Grimm discussed how to translate it and the philosophe suggested it should be ‘Tauricus’ or ‘le Taurien’.

  *6 But not even this was all show: when Lady Craven visited the Albanians in April 1786, they already wore a ‘kind of Roman warrior’s dress’ and had ‘Oriental and Italian poniards’ while the Cossacks performed for her just for the fun of it.

  *7 There was indeed a famine in certain areas, notably around Moscow, not in Potemkin’s richer southern provinces, after a bad harvest in 1786, which was why Catherine hurried back to the capital. When she arrived in Tula, far from Potemkin’s Viceroyalty, the local governor concealed local poverty with false façades but also did not inform her of the rising food prices. When Lev Naryshkin told her the bread prices, she, to her credit, cancelled the ball given for her that night. Both Catherine and Potemkin felt the suffering of ordinary people, when they heard about it, but neither would let a minor famine interfere with the glorious aggrandizement of the Empire nor with the magnificence of their lifestyles. But this was a characteristic of all eig
hteenth-century governments, however enlightened.

  *8 When Hitler invaded Russia on 22 June 1941, Stalin almost disappeared, saw nobody and seemed overwhelmed by the scale of responsibility and a temporary loss of nerve. He was apparently suffering some sort of depression. In May 1967, Rabin was ‘stammering, nervous, incoherent’. His biographer quotes an eye-witness as observing ‘it was almost as if he had lost his nerve, was out of control’.

  26

  JEWISH COSSACKS AND AMERICAN ADMIRALS: POTEMKIN’S WAR

  Prince Potemkin formed the singular project of raising a regiment of Jews…he intends to make Cossacks of them. Nothing amused me more.

  The Prince de Ligne

  You would be charmed with the Prince Potemkin than whom no one could be more noble-minded.

  John Paul Jones to the Marquis de Lafayette

  Catherine rallied the Prince of Taurida. ‘In these moments, my dear friend, you are not just a private person who lives, and does what he likes,’ she told him on the very day he wrote so desperately. ‘You belong to the state, you belong to me.’ Nonetheless she sent Potemkin an order, authorizing him to transfer command to Rumiantsev-Zadunaisky if he wished.

  When she received his most frantic letters, she displayed her cool good sense. ‘Nothing is lost,’ she said, like a strict but indulgent German schoolmistress. ‘The storm that was so harmful for us was equally harmful for the enemy.’ As for withdrawal from the Crimea, there seemed ‘no need to rush to start the war by evacuating a province which is not in danger’.*1 She ascribed his depression to what she called the ‘excessive sensibility and ardent assiduity’ of ‘my best friend, foster-child and pupil, who is sometimes even more sane than myself. But this time, I am more vigorous than you because you’re ill and I’m well.’1 This was the essence of their partnership: whoever was up would look after whoever was down. War had given the partners more worry but also more to share. Their military discussion often alternated with the warmest declarations of love and friendship.

  A week later, Potemkin emerged from his depression, partly thanks to Catherine’s letters, but even more because it turned out the fleet was damaged but not ruined: only one ship had been lost. ‘The destruction of the Sebastopol Fleet was such a blow I don’t even know how I survived it,’ he confessed to his empress. He was relieved he could hand over to Rumiantsev if it became too much. They agreed that she should despatch Prince Nikolai Repnin, a talented general and Panin’s nephew, to command the army under him. Serenissimus apologized for giving her such a shock: ‘It’s not my fault I am so sensitive.’2 She sympathized. In a very eighteenth-century diagnosis, Catherine blamed much of it on his bowels: his spasms ‘are nothing but wind’, she decreed. ‘Order them to give you something to get rid of the wind…I know how painful they are for people as sensitive and impatient as us.’3

  Potemkin had just recovered when the war began in earnest. On the night of 1 October, after a bombardment and several false starts, the Turks landed 5,000 crack Janissaries on Kinburn’s thin spit and tried to storm the fortress. The Turks constructed entrenchments. The Russians, under the brilliant Suvorov, charged thrice and finally managed to slaughter virtually the entire Ottoman force, but at a high cost. Suvorov himself was wounded twice. But the victory at Kinburn meant that Kherson and the Crimea were safe until the spring.

  ‘I can’t find words to express how I appreciate and respect your important service, Alexander Vasilievich,’4 Potemkin wrote to Suvorov, who was nine years older. The two great eccentrics and outstanding talents of their time had known each other since the First Turkish War. Their tense relationship fizzed with mutual admiration and irritation. Suvorov was a wiry little general with a cadaverous comedian’s face, brutal, intelligent eyes and repertoire of zany antics. ‘Hero, buffoon, half-demon and half-dirt,’ wrote Byron, ‘Harlequin in uniform.’5 He rolled naked on the grass every morning, doing somersaults in front of his army, jumped on tables, sang in the midst of high society, mourned a decapitated turkey by trying to return its head to its neck, lived in a straw hut on the beach, stood on one leg at parade and set his armies marching by crowing thrice like a cockerel. He asked his men mad questions such as ‘How many fish are there in the Danube?’ The correct answer was a firm one. ‘God save us from the “Don’t knows”,’ he used to exclaim.6

  Soon after Kinburn, a young French volunteer was writing a letter when his tent was unceremoniously opened and a scarecrow entered, wearing just a shirt. This ‘fantastical apparition’ asked to whom he was writing. To his sister in Paris, he replied. ‘But I want to write a letter too,’ said Suvorov, grabbing a pen and writing her a complete letter. When the sister received it, she said it was mostly unreadable – and the rest utterly crazy. The Frenchman decided ‘I had to deal with a lunatic.’ Legend has it that Suvorov once heard Catherine saying, vis-à-vis Potemkin, that all great men were eccentrics. Suvorov immediately began daily affecting a new singularity which in the end became second nature. Yet he spoke six foreign languages and was a connoisseur of ancient history and literature.7

  Suvorov, who like Potemkin advocated informal, easy clothes and simple tactics of attack, was unlike the Prince in his ruthless, very Russian lack of concern for the lives of his men. The bayonet was his favourite weapon: ‘Cold steel – bayonets and sabres! Push the enemy over, hammer them down, don’t lose a moment.’ Never trust the musket, ‘that crazy bitch’. He always wanted to storm and charge regardless of losses: speed and impact were everything. His greatest battles, Ismail and Praga, were bloodbaths.8 Every commander-in-chief needs a Suvorov. Potemkin was lucky to have him but he used him skilfully.*2

  Serenissimus now hailed Suvorov as ‘my dear friend’ and sent him endless presents from a greatcoat to a hamper of ‘pâté de Périgord’ – foie gras.9 He urged Catherine to promote Suvorov above his seniority: ‘Who Matushka could have such leonine courage?’ He should be given Russia’s highest order, the St Andrew. ‘Who has deserved the distinction more than him?…I begin with myself – give him mine!’10 Potemkin’s alleged jealousy of his subordinate became part of the Suvorov legend, but there is no trace of it in any of Potemkin’s letters and it would have seemed absurd during their lifetimes: Potemkin was supreme and Suvorov was just one of his generals. Suvorov was so moved by Potemkin’s affectionate letters that he wrote back, ‘I am a commoner! How can it be I was not flattered by Your Highness’s favour! The key to the secrets of my soul lie in your hands for ever.’11 Suvorov was Potemkin’s match in eccentricity and talent: contrary to the mythology of their hatred, they admired each other. Indeed their passionate, half-mad letters almost read like a love affair. ‘You can’t oversuvorov Suvorov,’ joked Serenissimus.

  Potemkin inspected Kherson, Kinburn and the fleets on one of his flying tours and then established his headquarters at Elisabethgrad, where he held his winter Court and planned the coming campaign. But he kept up his inspections: after a thousand versts on the road in icy weather, he complained to Catherine of piles and headaches. But he was achieving miracles in terms of repairing the old fleet and building a new flotilla to fight on the Liman.

  Grand Duke Paul declared he wished to fight the Turks and bring his wife to the front. Paul’s companionship was a dire prospect for Serenissimus, with the risk that the Heir might try to undermine his command. Nonetheless he agreed in principle. Catherine loathed her son now, comparing him to ‘mustard after dinner’. Despite two requests, she managed to put him off, using anything – from crop failure to the Grand Duchess’s latest pregnancy – to spare Serenissimus this tedious and dangerous fate. Paul spent the rest of the war drilling his troops at Gatchina ‘like a Prussian major, exaggerating the importance of every trivial and minute detail’, while tormenting himself with his father’s murder and threatening everyone with ‘hardness and vengeance’ on his accession. He had to bite his lip and congratulate Serenissimus on his victories, but his wife was grateful for Potemkin’s kindness t
o her brothers, who served in his army. As Catherine grew older, Potemkin flattered Paul, who remained sour as ever – ‘Heaven and Earth were guilty in his eyes.’ He took every opportunity to denounce his mother’s partner to anyone who would listen.12

  Joseph had not yet accepted the casus foederis of the treaty, but still complained that Potemkin and Rumiantsev were doing nothing. The Russians and the Austrians were watching each other closely: each wanted the other to bear the brunt of the war without losing out on the rewards. Both sides sent spies to watch each other.13

  Joseph’s spy was the Prince de Ligne, who was ordered to use his friendship with Potemkin to get the Russians to do as much of the fighting as possible. ‘You will report to me on a separate piece of paper in French,’ Joseph secretly instructed Ligne, ‘which will be concealed and placed in an ordinary packet with the envelope addressed carefully: For His Majesty Alone.’14 The ‘jockey diplomatique’15 did not know that this fell into the hands of the Russian Cabinet Noir – it remains in Potemkin’s archives – but he did notice Serenissimus’ reserve when he turned up in Elisabethgrad. ‘The Prince de Ligne, whom I love, is now a burden,’ Potemkin told Catherine.16 War was the ruin of their friendship.

  Elisabethgrad was a godforsaken little garrison-town, forty-seven miles from the Ottoman frontier. ‘What weather, what roads, what winter, what Headquarters I found in Elisabeth,’ wrote Ligne, who embraced Potemkin and asked, ‘When to Ochakov?’ This was a ludicrous question given that it was mid-winter and the Austrians, who were as surprised and unprepared as the Russians, had so far not even declared war. ‘My God,’ replied the still-depressed Potemkin. ‘There are 18,000 men in the garrison. I don’t even have as many in my army. I lack everything. I’m the unluckiest man if God doesn’t help me.’ Potemkin listed the Turkish garrisons in the nearby Ottoman fortresses, Akkerman, Bender and Khotin. ‘Not a word of truth in all of that,’17 Ligne commented. He was wrong.18 Pisani’s reports from Istanbul testified that the fortress had been freshly manned and refortified.*3 Potemkin had no intention of wasting Russian lives to save Austrian reputations: one has the distinct impression that some of his depression was diplomatic madness to distract the Austrians.