Catherine the Great & Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair

The circle froze around the body in that shocked silence that must always mark the passing of a great man. Countess Sashenka gently placed his head on a pillow, then raised her hands to her face and fell back in a dead faint. Some wept loudly; some knelt to pray, raising their hands to the heavens; some hugged and consoled each other; the doctors stared at the patient they had failed to save; others just peered at his face with its single open eye. To the left and right, groups of Moldavian boyars or merchants sat watching while a Cossack tried to control a rearing horse, which perhaps sensed how ‘the earthly globe was shaken’ by this ‘untimely, sudden passing!’.²⁰ The soldiers and Cossacks, veterans of Potemkin’s wars, were sobbing, one and all. They had not even had time to finish building their master’s tent.

So died one of Europe’s most famous statesmen. Contemporaries, while admitting his contrasts and eccentricities, rated him highly. All visitors to Russia had wished to meet this force of nature. He was always – by pure power of personality – the centre of attention: ‘When absent, he alone was the subject of conversation; when present he engaged every eye.’²¹ When they did meet him, no one was disappointed. Jeremy Bentham, the English philosopher who stayed on his estates, called him ‘Prince of Princes’.²²

The Prince de Ligne, who knew all the titans of his time, from Frederick the Great to Napoleon, best described Potemkin as ‘the most extraordinary man I ever met…dull in the midst of pleasure; unhappy for being too lucky; surfeited with everything, easily disgusted, morose, inconstant, a profound philosopher, an able minister, a sublime politician or like a child of ten years old…What is the secret of his magic? Genius, genius and still more genius; natural abilities, an excellent memory, much elevation of soul; malice without the design of injuring, artifice without craft…the art of conquering every heart in his good moments, much generosity…refined taste – and a consummate knowledge of mankind.’²³ The Comte de Ségur, who knew Napoleon and George Washington, said that ‘of all the personalities, the one that struck me the most, and which was the most important for me to know well, was the famous Prince Potemkin. His entire personality was the most original because of an inconceivable mixture of grandeur and pettiness, laziness and activity, ambition and insouciance. Such a man would have been remarkable by his originality anywhere.’ Lewis Littlepage, an American visitor, wrote that the ‘astonishing’ Serenissimus was more powerful in Russia than Cardinal Wolsey, Count-Duke of Olivares and Cardinal Richelieu had ever been in their native kingdoms.²⁴

Alexander Pushkin, who was born eight years after this death on the Bessarabian steppe, was fascinated by Potemkin, interviewed his ageing nieces about him and recorded their stories: the Prince, he often said, ‘was touched by the hand of history’. In their flamboyance and quintessential Russianness, the two complemented each other.²⁵ Twenty years later, Lord Byron was still writing about the man he called ‘the spoiled child of the night.’²⁶

Russian tradition dictated that the dead man’s eyes must be closed and coins placed on them. The orbs of the great should be sealed with gold pieces. Potemkin was ‘richer than some kings’ but, like many of the very rich, he never carried any money. None of the magnates in his entourage had any either. There must have been an awkward moment of searching pockets, tapping jackets, summoning valets: nothing. So someone called over to the soldiers.

The grizzled Cossack who had observed Potemkin’s death throes produced a five-kopeck piece. So the Prince had his eye closed with a humble copper coin. The incongruity of the death passed immediately into legend. Perhaps it was the same old Cossack who now stepped back and muttered: ‘Lived on gold; died on grass.’

This bon mot entered the mythology of princesses and common soldiers: few years later, the painter Elisabeth Vigée Lebrun asked a gnarled princess in St Petersburg about Potemkin’s death: ‘Alas, my darling, this great Prince, who had so many diamonds and such gold, died on the grass!’, replied the dowager, as if he had had the bad taste to expire on one of her lawns.²⁷ During the Napoleonic Wars, the Russian army marched singing songs of Potemkin’s death ‘on the steppe lying on a raincoat’.²⁸ The poet Derzhavin saw the romance in the death of this unbounded man in the natural wilderness, ‘like mist upon a crossroads’.²⁹ Two observers at different ends of the Empire – Count Fyodor Rostopchin (famous as the man who, in 1812, burned Moscow) in nearby Jassy, and the Swedish envoy, Count Curt Stedingk, in faraway Petersburg³⁰ – reacted with exactly the same words: ‘His death was as extraordinary as his life.’³¹

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