Catherine the Great & Potemkin

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  Potemkin borrowed prodigiously and he tormented his Scottish banker, Richard Sutherland, who became rich on Potemkin’s business and eventually rose to be Catherine’s Court banker and a baron.*4 Bankers and merchants circled Potemkin like vultures, competing to offer goods and loans.42 Sutherland worked hardest, and suffered most, to win Potemkin’s business. On 13 September 1783, he begged Potemkin ‘humbly to condescend to give orders to make payment to me of the rising claims which I have the honour to send him coming to 167,029 roubles and sixty kopecks’, mostly spent on state business, settling immigrants. The anguished banker tried to explain, ‘again I take the liberty of representing to Your Highness that my credit depends, and depends a lot, on the return of this money’.43 Sutherland was evidently desperate, because he owed other bankers in Warsaw and beyond, and it often seems as if Potemkin was about to set off a chain-reaction banking crash across Europe – but it is worth noting that most of this money was not spent on baubles. Sutherland was the means by which Potemkin financed the settlement of immigrants, the procurement of timber and the building of his towns, the best example of how his personal and imperial spending were entangled.

  By 1788, the Prince owed Sutherland 500,000 roubles. Three weeks later, Sutherland swore that things had reached such a ‘critical and worrying point’ as to force him to ‘come importuning to my first benefactor…to obtain…the sum without which I would not know how to honour my affairs’. It was Potemkin himself who scrawled in French on the letter: ‘Tell him he’ll receive 200,000 roubles.’

  Serenissimus was far from miserly – on the contrary, he was wildly generous. Saving was foreign to his nature. Only his death gave a snapshot of his fortune and even then it hardly enlightens us. Like the Empress herself, he was part of the state, and the Empire was his fortune.44

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  A country’s enemies multiply in proportion to its successes. Russia’s enemies, aroused by Potemkin’s dangerous victories, did all they could to encourage the Ottomans to keep fighting. Meanwhile Russia’s military activity became paralysed by the prospect of war against Prussia, Poland and England as well as Turkey and Sweden. So Potemkin spent the winter of 1789 and much of the following year trying to negotiate with the Sublime Porte. Initially, the Turks seemed sincere in their wish to make peace. Sultan Selim freed the Russian Ambassador from the Seven Towers and appointed ‘the famous Algerian knight,’45 ex-Capitan-Pasha Ghazi Hassan-Pasha, as grand vizier, to talk peace.

  However, Prussian diplomacy aimed to undermine Russia and fulfil the so-called Hertzberg Plan, named after the Prussian Chancellor, which was designed to secure the Polish towns of Thorn and Danzig for Prussia in return for Austria ceding Galicia to Poland and Russia returning the Danubian Principalities to Turkey. This required a coalition against Russia, so the Sultan was offered an alliance to secure the return of the Crimea. Sweden was offered Livonia with Riga. Russia’s ally Austria was threatened with Prussian invasion. Russia itself was forced to withdraw from Poland, leaving the field to Prussia, which found itself in the ironic situation of having the greatest influence in a country it wanted to carve up. It was only now, when Poland was offered constitutional reform and an alliance in return for the cession of Thorn and Danzig, that the Poles realized that they had been deceived: Prussia was not just as carnivorous as Russia but more so. Yet they were forced to accept the Prussian advances and turned on the Russians. England backed Prussia in demanding that Russia and Austria make peace with the Porte on the basis of the status quo ante bellum. There was no question of any Russian military operations: Potemkin had to move a corps to cover a possible attack by Poland and Prussia. By 24 December 1789, Catherine was telling her secretary: ‘Now we are in a crisis: either peace or a triple war with Prussia.’46

  Potemkin’s agent for the peace negotiations was a truly Levantine operator and diplomatic entrepreneur named Ivan Stepanovich Barozzi, a Greek quadruple agent for Russia, Turkey, Austria and Prussia simultaneously. After meanderingly mysterious Potemkinian conversations in Jassy, where he was shocked by the Prince’s lecherous behaviour, Barozzi headed for the Vizier’s headquarters, Shumla with Potemkin’s terms.47 The Dniester would be the new border. Akkerman and Bender would be razed. The Principalities would be ‘independent’.*5

  Barozzi reached Shumla on 26 December 1789. The Prince’s accounts show the way such discussions were lubricated with a shower of baksheesh. At least sixteen rings, gold clocks, chains, snuff-boxes, were designated for different Turkish officials, specified as ‘Ring with blue ruby and diamond for first secretary of Turkish ambassador Ovni Esfiru’, while Barozzi himself got a ‘ring with a big emerald’ either to present or to wear for his discussions with the Vizier.48 Potemkin even offered to build a mosque in Moscow. However charming the brilliants, Potemkin’s terms did not please the ‘Algerine renegado’. Serenissimus, unimpressed with the counter-proposals, gave his new terms on 27 February 1790. ‘My propositions are short,’ he said, ‘there is no need for a great deal of talk.’ There would be no armistice – ‘more the wish to gain time than make peace – from what I know of Turkish artifice’. Then came a Potemkinian phrase: ‘The Turks like to take a chariot to chase a hare.’ The Prince preferred to be defeated rather than tricked.49

  Potemkin was right not to commit himself completely to the Barozzi talks. The Prince knew from the Austrians and his Istanbul spies that Sultan Selim regarded the Grand Vizier’s peace talks as a secondary, parallel policy to his negotiations with the Prussian envoy, Dietz, in Constantinople. If the Turks could get help from Prussia and Poland, they could go on fighting. By the time Potemkin replied, the Sultan had already signed an aggressive alliance with Prussia on 20 January 1790 which committed Frederick William to help reconquer the Crimea and go to war against Catherine.

  As this noose tightened around Russia, ‘the health of the Emperor is the severest of all the storms which menace the political sky’, Potemkin told Kaunitz that January. Joseph II was stricken, physically with tuberculosis, and politically with revolts across his Empire from Hungary to the Netherlands. He seemed to be recovering when he had to undergo an agonizing operation on an anal abcess that sapped his strength. The death scene was tragic. ‘Has anyone wept over me?’, he asked. He was told that Ligne was in tears. ‘I did not think I was deserving of such affection,’ replied the Emperor. He suggested his own epitaph: ‘Here lies a prince whose intentions were pure but who had the misfortune to see all his plans collapse.’ Catherine was ‘sorry for my ally’, who was ‘dying, hated by everybody.’50 When Joseph died on 9/20 February 1790, Kaunitz supposedly muttered: ‘That was very good of him.’51

  It may have been good for the Habsburg Monarchy but it was another blow to Russia. On 18/29 March, Prussia tightened its ring once again and signed a military alliance with Poland. Frederick William moved 40,000 men towards Livonia in the north and another 40,000 in Silesia, mustering a 100,000-man reserve. The new Habsburg monarch, Leopold, King of Hungary (until he was elected emperor), was alarmed and immediately wrote to Potemkin: ‘You have lost a friend in my brother His Majesty the Emperor, you have found another in me who honours more than anyone your genius and nobility.’ Serenissimus and Leopold co-ordinated their defence of Galicia against the Poles – but the King of Hungary’s true concern was to prevent the Prussian invasion ‘in concert with Poland’ and save the Habsburg Monarchy. He begged Potemkin to make a peace that had already slipped away.52

  In the midst of these upheavals, the Prince learned that an admirable Englishman was dying of a fever near Kherson. John Howard was a selfless prison-reformer, who had dared to expose the misery of jails and hospitals on his travels across the world, not least in Potemkin’s Viceroyalty. Serenissimus sent his doctor to tend him, but Howard died. The Duke of Leeds, the British Foreign Secretary, wrote to say that ‘the British nation will never forget’ such sensibilité and Potemkin replied, ‘Mr Howard had every right to my attentions. He w
as the famous friend of Humanity and a British citizen and these, Monsieur le Duc, are claims enough to acquire my esteem.’ Howard became a Russian, and Soviet, hero.53

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  The Prince of Taurida now turned his guns and imagination on to Russia’s once and future enemy, Poland. The so-called ‘Patriots’, elated at the prospect of gaining a strong constitution, expelling the Russians and receiving Galicia from Austria, controlled Warsaw. The strain of losing Poland took its toll on Catherine and Potemkin – he suffered hangnail and rheumatism. Catherine sweetly sent him a ‘whole pharmacy of medicines’ and ‘a fox fur coat with a sable hat’.54 If it came to war against Prussia and Poland, ‘I will take command in person,’ Potemkin told Leopold.55 While the Austrians panicked and asked for Russian assistance, military operations against the Turks were suspended.

  Catherine regarded Poland as an enemy to be dealt with when she had the chance, but Potemkin’s protean imagination had for some time been evolving a plan to insert a Trojan Horse into the Commonwealth. The Trojan Horse was himself, backed by his Orthodox co-religionists in eastern Poland and by his new Cossack Host. He would raise Orthodox Poland in the Palatinates of Bratslav, Kiev and Podolia (where his huge estates lay) against the Catholic centre, on behalf of Russia, in the Cossack tradition of Hetman Bogdan Khmelnitsky. So, after taking Bender, he asked Catherine to grant him a new title with special historic resonance: grand hetman.56

  ‘Your plan is very good,’ replied the Empress, though she wondered if the Hetmanate would provoke more hatred in the Polish Sejm.57 Nonetheless in January, she appointed him ‘Grand Hetman of the Black Sea and Ekaterinoslav Cossack Hosts’. Potemkin was delighted with his Hetmanate and designed a resplendent new uniform in which he posed round Jassy.58 His own extravagance grated on his sometimes coenobitic nature: he had the sensitivity to notice that his poorer officers could not keep up, so he ordered everyone, including himself, to wear plain cloth tunics – much more Spartan, he told Catherine.59 He had become careful to share his glory with the Empress. When she hailed him as ‘my Hetman’, he replied: ‘Of course I’m yours! I can boast that I owe nothing to anyone except you.’60

  Potemkin, who already effectively controlled Russian foreign policy towards Austria and Turkey, was taking over Polish policy too. He demanded the sacking of the Russian Ambassador in Warsaw, Stackelberg, whom he called a scared ‘rabbit’,61 so Catherine appointed Potemkin’s ally Bulgakov.62 She knew that Potemkin had his own interests in Poland and remained sensitive to the possibility of his forming an independent duchy out of his lands. He reassured her that ‘there’s nothing I wish for myself here’ and, as for the hetman title, ‘if your welfare did not demand it’, he did not need a ‘phantom that was more comic than distinguished’. Meanwhile he spent the spring building up his own Cossack Host – even persuading some of his Zaporogian bachelors to marry.63

  Potemkin’s Hetmanate did outrage the Patriots in Warsaw. Rumours of his plans to become king of Poland reached a new intensity. The Prince indignantly denied this ambition to Bezborodko: ‘It’s forgivable for the King [of Poland] to think I want his place. For me, let the devil be there. What a sin it is to think that I may have other interests than those of the state.’64 Potemkin was probably telling the truth: the crown of Poland was a fool’s cap. A Ukrainian or Moldavian duchy loosely attached to Poland was more feasible. Besides, he had long since convinced himself of that statesman’s vanity – that what was good for Potemkin was good for Russia.

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  The French and Polish Revolutions changed the atmosphere at Catherine’s Court as well as her foreign policy. She was alarmed by the spread of French ideas – or ‘poison’ as she called them – and was determined to suppress them in Russia. In May 1790, when Russia was losing its Austrian ally, the Swedish War was critical, and the Prusso-Polish alliance threatened to open a new front, a young nobleman named Alexander Radishchev published an anonymous book, A Journey from St Petersburg to Moscow, which was veiled attack on Catherine, serfdom and Potemkin, whom he implied was an Oriental tyrant. However, it was the application of French Revolutionary principles to Russia, not merely the insults about Potemkin, that outraged her. Radishchev was arrested, tried for sedition and lèse-majesté – and sentenced to death.

  The Prince intervened on the author’s behalf, even though the Revolutions had made this a dangerous time to undermine the regime, even though he was personally attacked, and despite the pressure on him. ‘I’ve read the book sent to me. I am not angry…It seems, Matushka, he’s been slandering you too. And you also won’t be angry. Your deeds are your shield.’ Potemkin’s generous response and sense of proportion calmed Catherine. She commuted the sentence and Radishchev was exiled to Siberia. ‘The monarch’s mercy’, wrote the writer’s grateful brother on 17 May 1791, ‘was obtained by Prince Grigory Alexandrovich.’65

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  The Prince was still negotiating with the Grand Vizier. Catherine decided that the demand for an independent Moldavia with its own prince (Potemkin) was excessive, given the Porte’s new treaty with Prussia. The ever flexible Prince seamlessly switched policies and proposed instead that Moldavia be given to Poland as a morsel to tempt the Commonwealth back to the Russian fold. He lost nothing because it could still become his private Polish duchy.66 Serenissimus was suffering. ‘Anxiety of such uncertainty weakens me: deprived of sleep and food,’ he told her, ‘I’m worse than a baby in arms.’ He did not forget Zubov either: Potemkin loved Catherine’s young lover ‘more and more, for he pleases you’.67

  Once Sultan Selim was committed to fight on, backed by Prussia, the Grand Vizier’s peace policy became obsolete. The ex-Capitan-Pasha was too prestigious to kill openly, so the Crocodile of Sea Battles perished mysteriously on 18 March 1790, probably of the Sultan’s poison. This alarmed Catherine. ‘For God’s sake,’ she warned Potemkin. ‘Be on guard against the Turk…He may poison you. They use such tricks…and it’s possible the Prussians will give them the opportunity’ to exterminate the man ‘whom they fear most’.68 Meanwhile, the Turks in Moldavia took the opportunity to defeat Coburg’s Austrian army, which provoked a Potemkinian outburst to Catherine that the Austrian Field-Marshal had ‘gone like a fool and been thrashed like a whore’. But the inconsistent King of Prussia was shocked when he learned that his new treaty with the Porte committed him to fight Russia and disowned the alliance, recalling his envoy Dietz in disgrace. Frederick William was more interested in fighting the Austrians. In May, he assumed personal command of his army.69

  The Habsburgs succumbed to the Prussian threat. Leopold abandoned Joseph’s hopes of winning Turkish territory in order to restore order to his own provinces and negotiated a rapprochement with Prussia, therefore withdrawing from the Turkish War. On 16/27 July at Reichenbach, Leopold agreed to the Anglo-Prussian demands of instant armistice on the basis of the status quo ante bellum. Prussia celebrated this victory by raising the stakes: Frederick William ratified Dietz’s Prusso-Turkish treaty after all. Russia stood alone in the cold war against Prussia, England and Poland, and in the hot one against Turkey and Sweden.

  On 28 June, the Swedes for the first time defeated the Russian Baltic Fleet, now commanded by Nassau, whose recklessness caught up with him at Svensksund.70 But Catherine, who hated admitting bad news, delayed telling Potemkin for three weeks.71 However, this cloud had a silver lining – the Swedish victory saved Gustavus’ reputation, therefore allowing him to seek an honourable peace, signed on 3/14 August at Verela, based on the status quo ante bellum. ‘We’ve pulled one paw out of the mud,’ exulted Catherine to Potemkin. ‘When we pull the other one out, then we’ll sing Hallelujah!’72

  The withdrawal of Austria from the war had temporarily alleviated the threat from Prussia too. Potemkin and Catherine realized that, while Prussia and England cooked up their next move, there was a chance to break the Turks, who
had strengthened their forces on the Danube and in the Caucasus. The Prince was as ‘tired as a dog’, travelling back and forth the 1,000 versts between Kherson, Ochakov and his new naval base, Nikolaev, to inspect his ships. Nonetheless, he created an amphibious strategy to reduce the Turkish fortresses on the Danube which would open the road to Constantinople.73 The fleet was to patrol the Black Sea. The army was to take the Danubian fortresses. The flotilla – a most Potemkinian improvisation of converted imperial barges, Benthamite gunboats, Zaporogian chaiki and a Marseilles merchantman disguised as a warship, commanded by Ribas and his motley crew of ‘Greek brigands, Corfiote renegades and Italian Counts’74 – was to fight its way up the Danube to rendezvous with the army beneath the most formidable Turkish fortress in Europe: Ismail.

  Potemkin personally devised the training for the amphibious troops on Ribas’s flotilla over the summer: his instructions, which show that the Prince’s ideas predated Suvorov’s much more famous Art of Victory, reveal his modernity, imagination and military skill. ‘Find out who’s most fit for precise shooting, who’s good at running and who is skilled in swimming,’ he demanded in an order that shows he envisaged what we would call marine assault commandos, lightly armed and highly skilled. Simultaneously, in the Caucasus, he also ordered his Kuban and Caucasus generals to destroy the 40,000-strong army of Batal-Pasha before moving on the great Ottoman fortress of Anapa.75