Catherine the Great & Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair

Joseph and Catherine had meanwhile agreed the terms of a defensive treaty, including the secret clause aimed at the Sublime Porte – but Potemkin’s grand enterprise now hit a snag that was very much of its time. This was the so-called ‘alternative’, a diplomatic tradition by which monarchs signing a treaty put their name first on one copy and second on the other. The Holy Roman Emperor, as Europe’s senior ruler, always signed first on both copies. Now Catherine refused to admit Russia was lower than Rome, while Joseph refused to lower the dignity of the Kaiser by signing second. So, amazingly, the realignment of the East ground to a halt over a matter of protocol.

This was one of those crises where the difference between Catherine and Potemkin was clearest, because, while the Empress was obstinate, the Prince begged her to be flexible and get the treaty signed. The bickering of the partners echoes through their letters and Cobenzl’s despatches. Potemkin rushed back and forth between the two sides. Catherine at one point told him to inform Cobenzl ‘to give up such nonsense which will imminently stop everything’. Everything did stop.

The tension was not helped by Potemkin’s demands for favours for his nieces Alexandra and Ekaterina, both of whom were about to get married. Soon even Catherine’s favourite Lanskoy was embroiled in the rows. But Catherine devised an inspired solution for Potemkin to suggest to Joseph: they would each exchange signed letters, setting out their obligation to each other, instead of a treaty.²³

The highly strung Prince, faced with this crisis in the scheme of a lifetime, collapsed with ‘bad digestion’. Catherine visited Potemkin’s apartments to make up and spent the evening with him ‘from eight till midnight’. Peace was restored.

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Just as the crisis over the Austrian treaty reached its climax, on 10 May 1781, Potemkin ordered Count Mark Voinovich, a Dalmatian sailor, to mount a small invasion of Persia. He was pursuing a secret Persian policy while he was trying to smooth the obstacles from the path of his Greek Project.

This scheme had run parallel to the Austrian negotiations for a full year. Ten days before Joseph II had suggested the Mogilev meeting with Catherine, on 11 January 1780, Serenissimus ordered General Alexander Suvorov, his ablest commander, to assemble an invasion force at Astrakhan. He ordered the ships he had been building at Kazan on the Volga since 1778 to move southwards. The alliance with Austria might take more years to accomplish. In the meantime, Russia would probe the Persian Empire instead of the Ottoman.

The Persian Empire in those days extended round the southern end of the Caspian to include Baku and Derbent, all of today’s Azerbaijan, most of Armenia and half of Georgia. The Armenians and Georgians were Orthodox Christians. As with the Greeks, the Wallachians and the Moldavians, Potemkin longed to liberate his fellow Orthodox and bring them into the Russian Empire. At the same time, he was meeting Armenian representatives in Petersburg, discussing the liberation of the Christians of Armenia from the Persian yoke.

The Prince was one of the few Russian statesmen who understood commerce at that time: he knew that a trading post on the eastern Caspian was just ‘thirty days’ march from the Persian Gulf, just five weeks to get to India via Kandahar’. In other words, this was Potemkin’s first and admittedly minor blow in what came to be called ‘The Great Game’. We know that Potemkin was juggling his Greek Project with a Persian one because he talked about it with his British friends. The French and British watched Potemkin’s secret Persian plans with interest. Indeed, six years later, the French Ambassador was still trying to discover its secrets.

In February 1780, Sasha Lanskoy had fallen ill and Potemkin delayed his final orders to Suvorov, who was left to kick his heels in drab provincial Astrakhan. Once the anti-Ottoman Greek Project, and Joseph’s visit, was confirmed, it would have been foolish for Potemkin to spread his forces too thinly. So the plan was changed. Early in 1781, the Prince cancelled the invasion and instead persuaded Catherine to send a limited expedition, commanded by the thirty-year-old Voinovich, ‘a dangerous pirate’ from Dalmatia to some, a ‘sort of Italian spy of the ministers of Vienna’ to others, who had fought for Catherine in the First Russo-Turkish War and temporarily captured Beirut, now the capital of Lebanon.