Catherine still would not agree. She remained convinced that the alliance treaty was an attempt to draw her and her subjects into a European war. When Potemkin went back to her, she told him: “La mariée est trop belle; on veut me tromper” (“The bride is too beautiful; they wish to deceive me”). She emphasized her friendly feelings toward England but otherwise rejected the entire proposition. By the end of 1781, the issue was moot. In December of that year, the British army in North America surrendered when Lord Cornwallis handed his sword to George Washington at Yorktown. In March 1782, the Lord North government fell and was replaced by a Whig ministry. The idea of a Russian alliance was dropped.
Catherine had another reason for rejecting a treaty with England: her rapprochement with Austria had led to a formal alliance. On the strength of this alliance, she and Potemkin were preparing for the annexation of the Crimea, which both considered far more important than the acquisition of Minorca. It was Potemkin who had proposed and managed this peaceful annexation. The Treaty of Kuchuk Kainardzhi, which ended the first Turkish war in 1774, had established the independence of the Crimea, but the khanate still remained a nominal vassal state of the Ottoman sultan. Potemkin worried that geographically the peninsula split Russia’s Black Sea possessions, and he explained to Catherine the difficulty of guarding her southern frontier while the Crimea remained outside her empire. “The acquisition of the Crimea can make us neither stronger nor richer, but it will ensure our peace,” he said. In July 1783, Catherine announced the annexation of the Crimean peninsula into the Russian empire. Potemkin managed this acquisition without a war or a battle, although it came at a long-term personal cost: in the Crimea, he acquired a severe case of malaria that never entirely left him during the rest of his life.
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Crimean Journey and “Potemkin Villages”
OVER TIME, the story of Catherine the Great’s journey down the Dnieper River to the Crimea in the spring of 1787 has passed from history into legend. It has been described as the most remarkable journey ever made by a reigning monarch and as Gregory Potemkin’s greatest public triumph. It has also been disparaged as a gigantic hoax: the prosperous villages shown to the empress were said to have been made of painted cardboard; the happy villagers were declared to be costumed serfs, marched from place to place, appearing and reappearing, waving and cheering as Catherine passed by. These accusations became the basis of the myth of “Potemkin villages,” the settlements Potemkin supposedly fabricated along the Dnieper in order to deceive Catherine and her guests about the actual state of her southern territories. In time, the expression “Potemkin village” came to mean a sham, or something fraudulent, erected or spoken to conceal an unpleasant truth. As such, it became a cliché; now, it is part of the language. In evaluating the allegation, two facts should be considered. The first is that those who mocked and condemned were not present on the journey. The other is that the results of Potemkin’s work were personally observed by many eyewitnesses, including three sharp-eyed and sophisticated foreigners: the Austrian emperor, Joseph II; the French ambassador, the Comte de Ségur; and the Austrian field marshal Prince Charles de Ligne. Over two centuries, no one has produced any evidence that what these three said and wrote about their journey was untrue.
For nine years Potemkin had worked to transform the newly acquired areas of southern Russia into a prosperous part of Catherine’s empire. Proud of what he had achieved, he had been urging the empress to come and see what he had done. Finally, she agreed to come in the spring and summer of 1787, the year of her silver jubilee, the twenty-fifth anniversary of her accession to the throne. The planning and preparation of Catherine’s Crimean journey began. It was to be the longest journey of her life and the most spectacular public spectacle of her reign. For more than six months and over four thousand miles, she traveled by land and water, by sledge, river galley, and carriage. In doing this, she confirmed the future of this vast region. From the year of her journey until the German invasion in 1941, and then the independence of Ukraine in 1991, these lands never passed from Russian hands.
The Crimean Peninsula, which Potemkin most wanted the empress to see, had a history embracing many peoples and cultures. In the fifth and fourth centuries B.C., the Greeks had established colonies along the Crimean coast. Then called the Taurus, it was the site where Iphigenia, daughter of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, is said to have served as a priestess in the Temple of Diana. Three hundred years later, these Greek colonies became part of the Roman Empire; later, the Crimea was conquered and occupied by the Mongols. When Catherine annexed the peninsula in 1783, she instructed Potemkin to build roads, cities, and ports, enrich and broaden agriculture, and integrate the Muslim population into her empire without destroying their religion or culture. Potemkin then built cities, created parks, and planted vineyards and botanical gardens. He brought in cattle, silkworms, mulberries, and melon seeds. He began building warships, and at Kherson, Nikolaev, and on the Bay of Sebastopol he constructed naval bases for the new Russian Black Sea Fleet.
Catherine was eager to see and know these lands about which she had heard so much, and in which she had invested so many rubles. She also had diplomatic reasons for going: she wished to impress Europe and intimidate the Turks. On her journey, she would be meeting a king and an emperor: Stanislaus of Poland and Joseph II of Austria. Stanislaus, her former lover, was to join her at a point where the Dnieper River constituted the border between Russia and Poland. Joseph, her ally, had been persuaded to come so that together they could advertise the strength of the Russo-Austrian alliance. Her journey, therefore, was to be simultaneously a pleasure trip, a royal inspection, and a strong diplomatic statement.
Catherine was fifty-eight when she began this journey, and it was an unusual effort for a woman of her age to undertake. It displayed not only her vitality and enthusiasm but also her trust in the mastermind who for three years had been planning this enterprise. Once on her way, she said to Ségur:
Everything was done to deter me from this journey. I was assured that my progress would be bristling with obstacles and unpleasantness. They wished to frighten me with stories of the fatigue of the journey. These people had a very poor knowledge of me. They do not know that to oppose me is to encourage me, and that every difficulty they put in my way is an additional spur.
Primarily, she wanted to endorse and set her imperial seal on Potemkin’s achievements in the south. For years, his enemies at court had belittled his efforts, asserting that he had wasted or stolen the vast sums, now millions of rubles, allotted for the development of these new territories. Potemkin himself knew that the success of Catherine’s journey would make him unassailable—and that failure would ruin him. He knew also that the courts of Europe would be watching. He urged, therefore, that Catherine bring with her the foreign ambassadors stationed in St. Petersburg so that they could report to their governments what they had seen.
Potemkin hurled himself and all of his talents for organization and showmanship into this enormous effort. He decided where the immense imperial caravan would stop every night. He erected or borrowed houses, mansions, and palaces to accommodate the travelers. He chose sites for balls, fireworks, and celebrations. He ordered the construction of a fleet of large, luxurious galleys to carry the empress and her guests down the Dnieper River. He had guidebooks printed giving detailed descriptions of the towns and villages the galleys would pass and naming the distances the fleet would travel each day.
Catherine made up the guest list. There were omissions. The Prussian ambassador was not included because the death of Frederick the Great a year before had brought his nephew, Frederick William, to the throne in Berlin, and the nephew’s dislike of Catherine was warmly reciprocated. The Saxon ambassador, Georg von Helbig, was left behind because he had made a practice of denigrating Potemkin and his achievements.
More conspicuous were the absentees from among the members of Catherine’s own family. Until the last minute, she planned to take her two oldes
t grandchildren, ten-year-old Alexander and eight-year-old Constantine. She wanted them to see the territories, the towns, and the fleet she was adding to their inheritance. But as the time to depart drew closer, the protests of the boys’ parents grew louder. The usually serene Maria Fyodorovna became almost hysterical at the thought of her sons traveling to a region where plague and malaria were perennial hazards. Dr. Rogerson supported her. Catherine persisted, arguing that it was cruel to let a grandmother go off on a long journey without a single member of her own family to accompany her. To Paul and Maria, she wrote: “Your children belong to you, they belong to me, they belong to the state. From their earliest childhood, I have made it my duty and my pleasure to give them the tenderest care. I reasoned as follows: it will be a consolation for me, when I am far from you, to have them near me. Am I to be the only one who is deprived, in my old age, for six months, of the pleasure of having some member of my family with me?” Receipt of this letter only made Maria more desperate. Paul then suggested that both he and Maria as well as their sons should accompany his mother. Or, if this was not acceptable, he offered to be the only family member to go with her. He was, after all, heir to the throne; presumably the lands to be visited would one day be his to rule. Why should he not see them? This suggestion, like the other, was coldly rejected. “Your latest proposal would cause the greatest of upsets,” she wrote. The truth was that she did not want the “heavy baggage” of Paul’s presence to detract from her enjoyment of Potemkin’s triumph.
In the end, the question became moot. On the eve of departure, both grandsons developed chicken pox. Six doctors had to be summoned to testify to this fact before Catherine surrendered and agreed that her grandsons should stay home. Paul, too, remained behind, embittered because he had not been delegated any authority over anything during her absence.
On New Years Day 1787, Catherine received the diplomatic corps at the Winter Palace, and then drove to Tsarskoe Selo. At eleven in the morning on January 7, in brilliant sunshine and bitter cold, she left Tsarskoe Selo in the first of fourteen large, comfortable carriages mounted on broad runners to convert them into sledges. Catherine’s carriage had seats for six, and she began the journey riding with her current favorite, Alexander Mamonov, Lev Naryshkin, Ivan Shuvalov, and a lady-in-waiting. All were wrapped in soft furs, with bearskins draped over their laps. Behind her, other carriage-sledges carried the foreign ambassadors, members of the court, government officials, and her personal staff. Aware that, despite the traditional hostility between their two countries, they liked each other privately, she had placed the French and English ambassadors, Philippe de Ségur and Alleyne Fitzherbert (later Lord St. Helens), in the same carriage. One hundred twenty-four smaller sleighs and sledges followed, carrying doctors, apothecaries, musicians, cooks, engineers, hairdressers, silver polishers, washerwomen, and scores of other male and female servants.
In January in northern Russia, everything vanishes beneath a deep blanket of whiteness. Rivers, fields, trees, roads, and houses disappear, and the landscape becomes a white sea of mounds and hollows. On days when the sky is gray, it is hard to see where earth merges with air. On brilliant days when the sky is a rich blue, the sunlight is blinding, as if millions of diamonds were scattered on the snow, refracting light. In Catherine’s time, the log roads of summer were covered with a smooth coating of snow and ice that enabled the sledges to glide smoothly at startling speeds; on some days, her procession covered a hundred miles. “It was a time,” wrote Ségur, “when every animal stayed in its stable, every peasant by his stove, and the only sign of human life were the convoys of sleighs passing like small ships over a frozen sea.” In those northern latitudes at this time of year, daylight lasts no more than six hours, but this did not hinder Catherine’s progress. When darkness fell in the afternoon—as early as three o’clock on the first days of the journey—the road was illuminated by bonfires and blazing torches.
Travel did not alter Catherine’s daily schedule. She rose at six as she did in St. Petersburg, drank coffee, and then worked alone or with her secretary or ministers for two hours. At eight, she summoned her close friends to breakfast, and at nine, she entered her carriage to resume the journey. At two, she halted for midday dinner, then resumed an hour later. At seven, long after the fall of darkness, she stopped for the night. Usually, Catherine was not tired and would go back to work or join her companions for conversation, cards, or games until ten.
Speeding over the snow, Catherine shuffled the passengers in her sledge in order to shift topics and diversify her amusement. Frequently, Ségur and Fitzherbert were exchanged for Naryshkin and Shuvalov. Ségur, sophisticated and intelligent, a born storyteller, was her favorite. She laughed at most of what he said, but, at one point, he discovered the limits of her tolerance:
One day when I was sitting opposite her in her carriage, she indicated to me the desire to hear some snippets of light verse which I had composed. The gentle familiarity which she permitted to the people who were traveling with her, the presence of her young favorite, her gaiety, her correspondence with … Voltaire and Diderot, had made me think that she could not be shocked by the liberty of a love story and so I recited one to her which was admittedly a little risqué, but nevertheless decent enough to have been well received by ladies in Paris.
To my great surprise, I suddenly saw my laughing traveling companion reassume the face of a majestic sovereign, interrupt me with a completely unrelated question, and so change the subject of conversation. Several minutes later, to make her aware that I had learned my lesson, I begged her to listen to another piece of verse of a very different nature, to which she paid the kindest attention.
In Smolensk, the journey was delayed for four days by massive snowdrifts and by a feverish sore throat that had stricken Mamonov. But a letter from Potemkin, still in the Crimea, urged Catherine on: “Here, the greenery in the meadows is starting to break through,” he said. “I think the flowers are coming soon.”
On January 29 the cavalcade reached Kiev, standing on the high, west bank of the Dnieper River. The empress, whose only previous visit had been forty-three years earlier when she was a fifteen-year-old grand duchess accompanying Empress Elizabeth, was welcomed with saluting cannon and pealing bells. Each ambassador was assigned his own palace or mansion, handsomely furnished, staffed with servants and stocked with excellent wines. At night, there were games, music, and dancing. Catherine often played whist with Ségur and Mamonov.
Potemkin arrived from the Crimea. At first, he remained in seclusion, away from all the excitement he had created, declaring that he intended to observe Lent in the company of monks rather than courtiers and diplomats. He chose the Pecherskaya Lavra, the famous Monastery of the Caves, hollowed out of the cliff rising from the river. Here, in a labyrinth of caves and low, narrow tunnels, seventy-three mummified saints lay in open niches, close enough for passersby to reach out and touch. Catherine, knowing Potemkin’s moods, warned, “Avoid the prince when you see him looking like an angry wolf.” The cause of the prince’s behavior was worry; in overseeing this journey he had accepted an enormous responsibility, and the most difficult parts lay ahead.
Along with Potemkin, another new traveler joined the party at Kiev. This was Prince Charles de Ligne, a fifty-year-old Belgian-born aristocrat, now an Austrian field marshal in the service of Emperor Joseph II. Arriving from Vienna, Ligne was a welcome addition. A European cosmopolitan, at ease corresponding with Voltaire or Marie Antoinette, he was witty, wise, sophisticated, cynical, and sentimental, and, at the same time, diplomatic and discreet. A friend of sovereigns and princes, affectionate with equals, popular with inferiors, he put everyone at ease. He was delighted to be invited by Catherine, whom he later described as “the greatest genius of her age.” Of all Catherine’s guests on the journey, Ligne remained most consistently in favor, not only with Catherine but with everyone else. Catherine herself described him as “the pleasantest company and the easiest person to live with that I have
ever met.” When his master, friend, and confidant Joseph II joined the party, Ligne was asked to share the imperial carriage and overhear the conversation between the two monarchs. Ligne joined in when asked to do so; the other occupant, Alexander Mamonov, too bored to listen, slept.
Catherine and her guests remained in Kiev for six weeks. Thereafter, the journey was to be resumed in large galleys built for the voyage down the river. On April 22, cannon signaled that the ice on the river had cracked. At noon, the empress and her guests boarded seven opulently decorated and furnished Roman-style galleys, all painted in red and gold, with the Russian imperial double eagle emblazoned on their sides. Catherine’s galley, named Dnieper, had a bedroom hung with gold and scarlet silk brocade, a drawing room, a library, a music room, and a dining room. A private canopied deck offered her the opportunity to take the air while avoiding the sun. The six galleys following hers were almost as luxurious: also painted red and gold with interiors lined with expensive brocades. Potemkin’s galley housed the prince, no longer an “angry wolf,” two of his nieces and their husbands, and his new friend, the raffish soldier of fortune Prince Charles de Nassau-Siegen. This forty-two-year-old Franco-German, the impoverished heir to a tiny principality, had sailed around the world, fought on land and sea, married a Polish woman, and then come to Russia, where he had met Potemkin. Catherine was dubious. “It is odd that you like Prince Nassau considering his universal reputation as a hothead,” she told Potemkin. “Still, it’s well known that he is brave.”
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