Catherine the Great & Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair

The idea itself was not new: Muscovite propaganda had promoted Russia as the ‘Third Rome’ ever since the Fall of Constantinople, which Russians still called Tsargrad, city of Caesars. In 1472, the Grand Duke of Muscovy, Ivan III, married the last Emperor’s niece, Zoë Palaelogina. His Metropolitan hailed him as the ‘new Emperor of the new Constantinople – Moscow’ and he used the title Tsar (Caesar), which Ivan the Terrible adopted. In the next century, Filofey, a monk, pointed out that ‘two Romes have fallen, but the third stands and there will be no fourth’.⁹ But the neo-Classical splendour, the daring symmetry of religion, culture and politics, the practicality of the Austrian alliance, and the specific plan of a partition, belong to Potemkin. His talent was not merely the impulsive conception of ideas but also the patience and instinct to make them real: he had been following this Byzantine rainbow ever since coming to power and it had taken him six years to circumvent the pro-Russian Panin.

As early as 1775, when Catherine and Potemkin celebrated the Turkish peace in Moscow, the Prince had befriended the Greek monk Eugenios Voulgaris, who would supply the Orthodox theology for the Greek Project. On 9 September 1775, Catherine appointed Voulgaris, on Potemkin’s suggestion, as the first archbishop of Kherson and Slaviansk. These cities did not yet exist. Kherson, named after the ancient Greek city of Khersonesos and the birthplace of Russian Orthodoxy, was merely a Greek name in the fevered imagination of Potemkin.

Catherine’s decree appointing the Archbishop proclaimed the dubiously Greek origins of Russian Orthodoxy, a piece probably written by Potemkin. One of his first acts on becoming favourite was to found a Greek gymnasium. He now appointed Voulgaris to direct it. Potemkin tried to get his Greek Archbishop to be his ‘Hesiod, Strabo Chrysostomos’ and write a history of the region, ‘dig up the hidden past…’ and show the link between the Ancient Scythians and the Graeco-Slavs. Voulgaris never wrote the history, but he did translate Virgil’s Georgics and dedicated the work to Potemkin, ‘most high and eminent philhellenic prince’, along with an ode to his new Athens on the Dnieper that ended: ‘Here once again is to be seen the former Greece; Thou, famous Prince, be indeed victorious.’¹⁰ All this was just part of Potemkin’s philhellenic programme to form a Greek civilization in a new Byzantine Empire around the Black Sea.

—

The genesis of the Greek Project is a window into the way the Empress and the Prince worked together. Catherine’s rising secretary Alexander Bezborodko actually drafted the ‘Note on Political Affairs’ in 1780 that laid out the Project and it has been claimed that he conceived the idea. This is to misunderstand the relationship of the troika that henceforth made Russian foreign policy.

Potemkin conceived the Greek Project almost before Bezborodko arrived in Petersburg, as shown in his letters and conversation, his patronage of Voulgaris, the naming of Constantine and the foundation of Kherson in 1778. Bezborodko’s ‘Note’ was a feasibility study of the idea, based on an explanation of Byzantine–Ottoman–Russian relations since the mid-tenth century, clearly commissioned by Catherine and Potemkin. Bezborodko’s draft of the Austrian treaty of 1781 reveals how they worked: the secretary drafted on the right hand side of the page. Then Potemkin corrected it on the left in pencil, which he addressed to Catherine. From now on, Potemkin conceived the ideas and Bezborodko drafted them. Thus, on the Prince’s death, Bezborodko was speaking the literal truth when he said that Potemkin was good at ‘thinking up ideas when someone else had actually to do them’.¹¹

Bezborodko was an ‘awkward, clownish and negligent’ Ukrainian hobbledehoy with thick lips and popping eyes who blundered about, his stockings about his heels, with the gait of an elephant. However, as Ségur realized, he ‘concealed the most delicate mind in the most oafish envelope’. He was said to relish regular orgies in the Petersburg brothel district. Indeed he often disappeared for thirty-six hours at a time. Italian opera-singers imported young Italian girls for his seraglio; he paid a soprano, Davia, 8,000 roubles a month which she repaid by cuckolding him with anyone she could find. ‘Though richly dressed, he always appeared as if he had pulled on his clothes at the end of an orgy,’ which he probably had.