Catherine the Great & Potemkin

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  In August, the Prince of Taurida established new headquarters in the captured fortress of Bender on the Dniester, a convenient place to supervise his armies and navies on all fronts while keeping in contact with Warsaw, Vienna and Petersburg. Here, in this half-destroyed Tartar town, surrounded by steppes, he indulged himself in a Sardanapalian effulgence that beggared even his Jassy Court.

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  New campaign, new mistress: his relationship with Praskovia Potemkin, whom he had loved for two years, ended in Jassy and she was sent to join her complaisant husband in the field. As armies marched, barges rowed and fleets sailed, Potemkin may have enjoyed a short affair with Ekaterina Samoilova, the lascivious niece-by-marriage who had loved Damas at Ochakov. Ligne wrote to say he ‘tenderly loved’ Potemkin and was jealous that he was missing ‘the beautiful eyes, beautiful smile and noble indifference of Madame Samoilova’.

  However, she did not last long because Praskovia’s place as ‘favourite sultana’ was then taken by Princess Ekaterina Dolgorukaya, just twenty-one years old and said to be the prettiest girl in Russia. ‘Her beauty struck me,’ wrote the painter Vigée Lebrun. ‘Her features had something Greek mixed with something Jewish about them, above all in profile.’ Her long dark hair, let down carelessly, fell on her shoulders. She had full lips, light blue-grey eyes, ivory skin and splendid figure.76 Potemkin’s Court was also enlivened by the arrival of exiles from the French Revolution who had volunteered to fight for Russia.

  One of them was Alexandre, Comte de Langeron, a veteran of the American War, who was precisely the sort of Gallo-centric aristocrat who sneered at primitive Russians – and was so outraged by Potemkin’s sybaritic splendour that his account regurgitates every malicious lie he heard. Langeron’s (and Ligne’s) bitter memoirs of Potemkin have dominated his historical image in the West ever since. Yet Langeron ended a disappointed man, unjustly cashiered by Alexander I after the Battle of Austerlitz, then forgiven, and later appointed governor-general of the south, in which job he lasted a year. ‘Incapable of commanding a corps,’ wrote Wiegel, ‘he got command of a country.’ Only after these failures was he big enough to recognize Potemkin’s greatness and pen a passionate tribute.

  Langeron was joined by his more gifted compatriot, the twenty-four-year-old Armand du Plessis, Duc de Richelieu, who left us a less prejudiced account of life with Serenissimus. This admirable aristocrat, with fine, serious features, curly locks and sardonic eyes, was a great-nephew of Louis XIII’s Cardinal and a grandson of Louis XV’s swashbuckling Field-Marshal. He inherited the cool shrewdness of the former and the cosmopolitan tolerance of the latter.77

  Ten days and nights on the road staying at dimly lit inns had not prepared Richelieu for the spectacle that struck his eyes on entering the Prince’s salon in the Pasha’s Palace in Bender: ‘a divan stuffed with gold under a superb baldaquin; five charming women with all the taste and careless elegance possible, and the sixth dressed with all the magnificence of Greek costume, lay on sofas in the Oriental manner’. Even the carpet was interwoven with gold. Flowers, gold and rubies were strewn around. Filigree scent-boxes wafted exquisite Arabian perfumes – ‘Asiatic magic’. Potemkin himself, wearing a voluminous sable-edged coat with the diamond stars of the Orders of St Andrew and St George, and little else, sat among them – but closest to Princess Dolgorukaya, who was daringly wearing Turkic costume like an odalisque (except the pantaloons). She never left his side.

  Supper was served in a hall by tall Cuirassiers with silver belts and breastplates, red capes and high fur hats surmounted by a tuft of feathers. They walked ‘two by two in pairs…like the Guards in tragedy plays’, while the orchestra performed. Richelieu was introduced to Potemkin, who greeted him shyly. He was then relieved him to lose himself in the crowd and find his friends Damas and Langeron.78 The Prince, wrote Richelieu, surpassed ‘all that the imagination can define as the most absolute. Nothing is impossible to his power – he commands today from Mount Caucasus to the Danube and he also shares with the Empress the rest of the Government of the Empire.’79

  Fifty officers were gathered at the end of the brightly illuminated salon keeping their distance and waiting on the Prince. ‘Here one saw a dethroned Sultan, established for three years in the Prince’s antechamber, then another Sovereign who became a Cossack Colonel, there one saw an apostate Pasha, here a Macedonian and then further along Persian ambassadors’80 – and amid this bazaar sat Samuel Bentham, waiting for his papers to go home. Potemkin felt this Court lacked a painter, specifically the only artist ever allowed to paint him properly – Lampi. So he wrote to Kaunitz in Vienna, asking him to despatch the artist to Bender: ‘It relaxes my mind to have good painters around me who work under my gaze.’81

  ‘All that can serve the pleasure of a capital city’, noted Richelieu, ‘accompanies Prince Potemkin in the midst of camps and the tumult of armies.’82 The surreal daily life there resembled Petersburg with its little suppers, musical recitals, gambling, love affairs, jealousies, ‘all that beauty inspires with the delicious, cruel, and perfidious’.83 The Prince existed in a bizarre world so rarefied that ‘the word “impossible” had to be deleted from the grammar’. It was said that the magnificence with which he celebrated his love for Dolgorukaya ‘surpassed all that we read in 1001 Nights’.84 Whatever she wanted from the four corners of the world, she got. There were no longer any limits. The Princess said she liked dancers. When Potemkin heard of two captains who were the best gypsy dancers in Russia, he sent for them by courier – even though they were in the Caucasus. When they finally arrived, they danced daily, after dinner – one dressed as a girl, the other as a peasant. ‘I’ve never seen a better dance in all my life,’ recalled Potemkin’s adjutant, Engelhardt.85

  The Prince decided to build a subterranean palace for the Princess: he was bored with moving between his palace and the residences of his sultanas, so two regiments of Grenadiers worked for two weeks to build this trogledytic residence. When it was finished, Potemkin decorated its interior with Greek columns, velvet sofas and ‘every imaginable luxury’.86 Even Russians were awestruck by such extravagance, but the entire Russian army spent the winter in their zemliankas and the officers’ dug-outs were ‘as comfortable as houses’ with thatched roofs and chimneys.87 Potemkin of course went considerably further: there was a gallery for the orchestra but the sound was slightly ‘dulled’, which produced an even finer resonance. The inner sanctum of this underground pleasure dome was, like the seraglio, a series of more and more secret rooms: outside there were the generals. Then the apartment itself was divided into two: in the first men gambled day and night, but the second contained a divan where the Prince lay, surrounded by his harem, but always closer and closer to Princess Dolgorukaya.

  Ignoring the rules of civilized adultery, ‘alive with passion and reassured by his excess of despotism’, Potemkin sometimes forgot that the others were even there and caressed the Princess with ‘excessive familiarity’ as if she was just a low-born courtesan, instead of one of Russia’s grandest noblewomen. The Princess would then laughingly repulse him.88 When her friend Countess Golovina arrived, she was repelled by this tainted passion ‘based on vanity’. Virtuous Golovina initially believed Dolgorukaya’s insistence that there was no sexual relationship with Serenissimus, who was thirty years older. But then Dolgorukaya could not restrain herself any longer and suddenly ‘gave way to a coquetry so shocking’ that all was revealed.89 Her husband Vasily Dolgorukay interrupted Potemkin’s fun whenever possible. Langeron says Serenissimus seized him by the collar and shouted: ‘You miserable man, it’s me who gave you all those medals, none of which you deserved! You are nothing but mud and I’ll make of you what I wish!’ The Frenchman commented, ‘this scene would have caused some astonishment in Paris, London or Vienna’.90

  On one occasion, maybe during Sarti’s Ochakov cannonade, the Prince arranged his Ekaterinoslav Grenadiers with their hundred cannons and fo
rty blank cartridges for each soldier in a square around the subterranean palace. The drummers drummed. He cavorted inside the underground palace with the Princess and, at a supreme moment, gave the sign to fire. When her husband heard of this orgasmic salvo, he commented with a shrug, ‘What a lot of noise about nothing.’91

  Potemkin excelled himself at Princess Dolgorukaya’s birthday-dinner. Dessert was served. The guests were amazed to find their crystal goblets filled with diamonds instead of bonbons, which were served to them piled on long spoons. Even the spoilt Princess, sitting beside Potemkin, was impressed. ‘It’s all for your sake,’ he whispered. ‘When it’s you I fête, what astonishes you?’92

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  Potemkin’s indolence was always more apparent than real, but it served to confirm every foreign prejudice about Russian barbarism. Yet at the very moment when Langeron claimed he spent his time canoodling with Dolgorukaya, the archives attest that he had never worked so hard, or on such a colossal canvas. He was overseeing the building of his towns in such detail that he was specifying the shape of Nikolaev’s churchbells, the position of its fountains and the angle of the batteries around its Admiralty; supervising Faleev’s building of more gunboats and ships-of-the-line at the Ingul shipyards; reorganizing the war in the Caucasus and Kuban (sacking his commander there, Bibikov, for bungling the march on Anapa through ‘incompetence and negligence’, and appointing his successors), discussing the strategy of his flotilla with Ribas while ordering him to investigate financial abuse by officers. He also devised a new signalling system for the fleet and training for its gunners.

  On Polish matters, he finally agreed with Princess Lubomirska to grant her his Dubrovna estate as part of the payment for Smila.*6 He was instructing the Russian ambassadors to Warsaw, Stackelberg, then Bulgakov, on Russian policy, and receiving secret reports from Baron d’Asch in Warsaw about the Polish Revolution, dealing with King Stanislas-Augustus’ complaints about his Cossacks stealing Polish horses, and discussing his Hetmanate and secret Polish plans with pro-Russian magnates. Serenissimus was constantly reforming and improving the army, adding more light cavalry and ever more Cossacks, but he was also intent on deliberately watering down the aristocratic content of the elite Guards Regiments, promoting foreigners, Cossacks and Old Believers, much to the disgust of the higher nobility. He told Catherine that the officers of the Preobrazhensky had been ‘weakened by luxury’. He was therefore involved in a little more than just the seduction of Dolgorukaya. ‘My occupations are innumerable,’ he told Princess Lubormirska in a slight exaggeration. ‘They do not leave me a moment to think about myself.’93

  Then there was the international situation. The Poles were arming themselves: if they backed Prussia too closely, ‘it will be time to proceed to your plan’, Catherine told Grand Hetman Potemkin.94 Worst of all, the British and Prussians were now cooking up a war to stop the Russians. Catherine and Potemkin watched the storm clouds cautiously, though both had cheered up since the Swedish peace. Catherine confided that she was so ‘merry’ that her dresses were getting tight and needed to be let out. Nevertheless, she missed her consort: ‘I often feel, my friend, that on many occasions, I would like to talk to you for a quarter of an hour.’95 When the Prussian minister fainted and hit his head on the throne at Catherine’s Swedish peace celebrations, they saw it as a good omen. But the ‘extremely tired’ Catherine, so like Potemkin, always became ill once the tension broke. Now she almost collapsed. She confided she had a ‘strong bout of diarrhoea’ and ‘colic wind’.96

  The Prince was now the bogeyman of Prussians and Polish Patriots, who were assailing his regal ambitions; and, since 1789, there had been moves afoot in the Sejm to annul his indigenat and confiscate his Polish estates, involving him in yet more complex negotiations.97 Perhaps dreaming of retirement and security, he asked Catherine to grant him some southern land he had noticed: ‘I’ve got enough but there is no place I could lay my head pleasantly.’ She granted it and sent him a gold coffee set and a diamond ring.98

  There was one more burst of negotiating before Potemkin realized that only war would force the Turks to the table while Prussia and England were encouraging them. ‘I’m bored by Turkish fairy-tales,’ Potemkin told his negotiator, Lazhkarev. ‘Explain to them that if they want peace, do it more quickly – or I’ll defeat them.’99 It was to be war.

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  In March, he had assumed personal command of the Black Sea Fleet and appointed Rear-Admiral Fyodor Ushakov as his deputy – another of his outstanding choices. On 24 June, he ordered him to sea to ‘confront the enemy’. After inspecting the fleet himself, he sent him out again on 3 July: ‘Pray to God He will help us. Put all hopes in Him, cheer up the crews and inspire them for battle…’.100 Ushakov twice defeated the Turks, on 8 July, and 28/29 August off Tendra, blowing up their flagship. It was only seven years since Serenissimus had founded the fleet. ‘In the north you’ve multiplied the Fleet,’ Potemkin told Catherine, ‘but here you’ve created it out of nothing.’101 She agreed that it was their baby – ‘an enterprise of our own, hence close to our hearts’.102 Potemkin now ordered his flotilla to fight its way into the Danube. ‘I’ve ordered the Sebastopol Fleet to sea,’ he told Ribas, ‘and to make itself visible to you. You and your flotilla should be ready to join them at the mouth of the Danube…Inform me of everything.’103 In September, Potemkin rushed down to Nikolaev and the Crimea to inspect the fleets and then ordered the army to advance south towards the Danube.

  On another coast of the Black Sea, there was more good news: on 30 September, General Herman eliminated a 25,000-strong Turkish army and captured Batal-Pasha. ‘We hardly lost 40 men!’, Potemkin told Bezborodko.104 Nearer home, he ordered the taking of Kilia on the Danube, which failed bloodily on the first attempt because Ribas had not yet managed to destroy the Turkish Danube flotilla. Potemkin attempted a second storming and Kilia fell on 18 October 1790.105 Ribas broke into the Danube two days later and took Tulcha and Isackcha, as he worked his way up towards mighty Ismail. The Prince trusted and admired Ribas. ‘Having you there,’ he wrote, ‘I leave it under your command.’106 By the end of November, the entire lower Danube as far as Galatz was his – except for Ismail. Potemkin decided to take the fortress. ‘I will make an attempt on Ismail,’ he said, ‘but I don’t want to lose ten men.’107

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  Far to the west, Richelieu, Langeron and the Prince de Ligne’s son Charles were dining in Vienna, where they had gone to grumble about Potemkin’s inactivity, when they heard of Batal-Pasha’s defeat and the investment of Ismail. They left immediately and galloped to re-enlist with Potemkin at Bender. ‘I beg Your Highness to let me rejoin the army before Ismail,’ Langeron wrote to him.108 No young sabre wanted to miss the assault – the climax of Potemkin’s military career and one of the bloodiest days of the century.

  Skip Notes

  *1 Lazhkarev, whom Westerners compared to a gypsy clown, once repelled an Islamic mob in Negroponte by leaping off a balcony with a basin of water, threatening them with the horror of instant baptism. Later, in Alexander I’s entourage at Tilsit in 1807, it was he who met Napoleon and negotiated Russia’s annexation of Bessarabia, ceded by the Porte in the 1808 treaty, in return for French domination of Europe.

  *2 While Potemkin later came to represent hated Russian imperialism to the Rumanians, a French visitor, forty years on, found that the Jassy boyars still regarded him as an early father of Rumanian nationalism. This made sense since Dacia roughly forms Rumania. However, the sole legacy of the name was President Ceaucescu’s decision to name the national make of car the ‘Dacia’.

  *3 The Ghika Palace still stands: it is now the Medical Faculty of Iaşi University. It has been expanded, but it still has its original Classical portico.

  *4 It was Sutherland’s English roast beef which Potemkin so enjoyed, when he
came for dinner, that he had it wrapped up and took it home with him.

  *5 Potemkin also suggested that, if the Turks would back a Russian nominee for King of Poland, Russia would consider keeping the Bug as the border. In other words, Russia would use Ottoman help to retake Poland and, in either case, Potemkin had the potential to secure a crown for himself – Poland or Dacia. Nonetheless, even for Poland, it is hard to believe Potemkin would have accepted the Bug border, which would have meant surrendering Ochakov.

  *6 Potemkin’s Dubrovna appears in the history of Napoleon. The Emperor was to stay in Princess Lubomirska’s manorhouse in November 1812 during the Retreat from Moscow.

  30

  SEA OF SLAUGHTER: ISMAIL

  All that the devil would do if run stark mad,

  All that defies the worst which pen expresses,

  All which by hell is peopled, or as sad

  As hell, mere mortals who their power abuse

  Was here (as heretofore and since) let loose.

  Lord Byron, the storming of Ismail, Don Juan, Canto VIII: 123

  On 23 November 1790, some 31,000 Russian troops, under Lieutenant-Generals Ivan Gudovich, Pavel Potemkin and Alexander Samoilov, and the flotilla, commanded by Major-General de Ribas, invested indomitable Ismail. The season was late; sickness decimated the hungry army. Only the tough and talented Ribas had the stomach for an assault. The other three generals argued among themselves. None had the prestige on his own to force through the storming of an almost impregnable fortress.1 Ismail was built into a natural amphitheatre which was defended by 265 cannons and a garrison of 35,000 men, the strength of a medium-sized army. It was a semi-circle of formidable walls, deep ditches, interlocking towers, perpendicular palisades and redoubts, with the River Danube as the flat diameter. French and German engineers had recently reinforced its ‘brilliantly constructed’ battlements.2