Catherine the Great & Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair

In Vienna, Paul appalled his hosts, particularly after Joseph confided the secret of the Austrian alliance. The Habsburg saw that the ‘feebleness and pusillanimity of the Grand Duke joined to falseness’ were unlikely to make this angry snub-nosed paranoid into a successful autocrat. Paul spent six weeks in Austria, where he lectured Joseph about his loathing for Potemkin. When he arrived in the Habsburg lands in Italy, he ranted to Leopold, Grand Duke of Tuscany, Joseph’s brother, about his mother’s Court and denounced the Greek Project and the Austrian alliance. Catherine’s plans ‘for aggrandizing herself at the expense of the Turks and refounding the empire of Constantinople’ were ‘useless’. Austria had obviously bribed that traitor Potemkin. When he came to the throne, Paul would arrest him and clap him in prison!¹⁹ The Habsburg brothers were surely relieved when the Comte du Nord departed for Paris.

The Prince could insure himself against Paul only by changing the succession or by establishing a base outside Russia. He therefore pursued a different plan to discredit Paul once and for all – and possibly later remove him from the succession, leaving the throne to his son Alexander. When Potemkin heard that Paul’s suite included Prince Alexander Kurakin, another Prussophile enemy and Panin’s nephew, he asked the Austrians, via Cobenzl, to let him see the Cabinet Noir intercepts of Paul’s post. The Austrian secret services passed on to Potemkin what they gleaned from Paul’s contacts with Panin. The Prince was sure that he would catch Kurakin spying for the Prussians and therefore taint Tsarevich Paul.²⁰

Nikita Panin, ill as he was, knew that Kurakin’s post would be opened, so he arranged for Paul to keep in contact with his supporters at home via a third party, Pavel Bibikov, son of the general. The letter that was opened in early 1782 from Bibikov to Kurakin was a bombshell that, more than the Saldern Plot, ensured Paul’s exclusion from power for the rest of Catherine’s life. Bibikov described Catherine’s rule as ‘the horrible situation in the Motherland’ and criticized Potemkin, ‘Cyclops par excellence’ and ‘le borgne’, for ruining the army. ‘If he breaks his neck’, everything would return to its ‘natural order’.

Catherine was alarmed and angry. Bibikov was immediately arrested. Catherine personally wrote out the questions for his interrogation by Sheshkovsky. Bibikov’s excuse was that he was just unhappy at his regiment being stationed in the south. Catherine sent the results to the Prince, while ordering Bibikov tried in the Senate’s Secret Expedition. The trial in camera found him guilty of treason and, under military law, of defaming his commander, Potemkin, and sentenced him to death.

The Prince’s decency came into play. Even though Paul’s circle had actually discussed breaking his neck, Potemkin asked Catherine for mercy on 15 April 1782: ‘Even if virtue produces jealousy, it’s nothing still compared to all the good it grants to those who serve it…You have probably pardoned him already…He’ll probably overcome his dissolute inclinations and become a worthy subject of Your Majesty and I will add this grace to your other favours to me.’ Admitting he was terrified of Potemkin’s vengeance, Bibikov wept under interrogation. He offered to apologize publicly.

‘He shouldn’t be afraid of my vengeance,’ Potemkin wrote to Catherine, ‘in so far as, among the abilities granted to me by God, that inclination is missing. I don’t even want the triumph of a public apology…He’ll never find any example of my vengeance, to anybody, in my entire life.’²¹ This was true – but, more than that, it displayed the statesman’s measured moderation: he never pushed things too far and therefore never provoked an unwanted reaction.

Bibikov and Kurakin, recalled from Paul’s suite in Paris, were exiled to the south. When the Heir returned to Petersburg at the end of the journey, his influence was broken, his allies scattered. Even his mother disdained her tiresome, unbalanced son and his wife as ‘Die schwere Bagage’ – the heavy luggage.²² ‘Prince Potemkin is happier’, Cobenzl told Joseph, ‘than I’ve ever seen him.’²³

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The secret Austrian treaty was soon tested – in the Crimea, the key to the Black Sea, the last Tartar stronghold and the nub of Potemkin’s policy of southern expansionism. In May, the Prince headed beyond to Moscow ‘for a short trip’, visiting some estates. While he was on the road, the Turks again backed a Crimean rebellion against Catherine’s puppet Khan, Shagin Giray, who was driven out once more, along with the Russian resident. The Khanate dissolved into anarchy.