Catherine the Great & Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair

Then, just a few weeks after Potemkin’s return, Catherine gave him the ‘most secret’ rescript to annex the Crimea – but only if Shagin Giray died or was overthrown or he refused to yield the port of Akhtiar or if the Ottomans attacked or…There were so many conditions that both knew that he was really free to pull off his prize if he could get away with it. ‘We hereby declare our will’, the Empress wrote to the Prince on 14 December 1782, ‘for the annexation of the Crimea and the joining of it to the Russian Empire with full faith in you and being absolutely sure that you will not lose convenient time and opportune ways to fulfil this.’ There was still a risk that the Ottoman Empire would go to war or that the Great Powers would prevent it.¹⁸

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No wonder Potemkin was working so hard. He had to prepare for war with the Sublime Porte while hoping to avoid it. Catherine kept Joseph closely informed by letter on the shrewd calculation that, if he had received no surprises, he was less likely to bridle. If they were quick and the operation bloodless, they could get the Crimea before the rest of Europe could react. The clock was ticking because France and Britain were just negotiating peace in the American War. They signed the preliminaries on 9/20 January in Paris. The peace was not yet ratified, so the Russians could count on another six months. The diplomats tried to guess how far the partners would go: ‘The views of Prince Potemkin extend themselves every day and are of such a magnitude’, reported Harris, ‘as to exceed the ambition of the Empress herself.’¹⁹ Sir James understated the case when he wrote that ‘notwithstanding the pains he took to dissemble it’, Serenissimus was ‘very sorry to see our war drawing so near to its end…’.²⁰

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These were Potemkin’s last opportunities to enjoy the companionship of Sir James Harris. The Englishman felt he had played his last hand in Petersburg. When his friend Charles James Fox returned to the ministry as one-half of the Fox–North coalition, pursuing a pro-Russian policy, Harris demanded to be recalled while relations with Russia were friendly. Sir James and the Prince saw each other for the last time in the spring, when the latter was increasingly occupied with his southern preparations. Harris received his farewell audience from the Empress after Potemkin’s departure on 20 August 1783 and then left for home.^*1

Harris had made the mistake of basing his hopes on a man who was happy to advocate an English alliance, but who was really pursuing an entirely different policy in the south. When the Austrian alliance became active, Harris’s beguilement by Potemkin was exposed.

Sir James left Petersburg with high credit in London because his role as Potemkin’s friend and tutor in English civilization had brought him closer to the top than any other ambassador was ever to get in Russia. But he must have had mixed feelings about Potemkin, who had so played him. ‘Prince Potemkin is no longer our friend,’ he sadly told Charles James Fox. Potemkin’s archives show they kept in cheerful contact long afterwards. Harris often recommended travellers to the Prince: one was Archdeacon Coxe, the memoirist. ‘I know I owe you excuses,’ wrote Harris, ‘…but I know how you like men of letters…’. Catherine came to regard Harris as a ‘trouble-maker and intriguer’. Potemkin had ‘crushes’ on his friends and then moved on. He told a later ambassador that he had done much for Harris, who had ‘ruined everything’, and he growled at Bezborodko that Harris was ‘insidious, lying and not very decent’. Their friendship was later destroyed by Britain’s growing hostility to Russia – just one more sad example of the special graveyard reserved for diplomatic friendships.²¹

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The Prince spent February and March 1783 preparing military plans to cover Sweden and Prussia, potential Ottoman allies against Russia, while fielding armies against the Turks and sending the Baltic fleet back to the Mediterranean. The object of any war had to be the Ottoman fortress of Ochakov that dominated the Liman (estuary) of the Dnieper and therefore access to the Black Sea. Potemkin also turned his reforming eye to the dress and arms of the Russian soldier: in one of his barnstorming memoranda to Catherine, using his common sense and colourful colloquialisms, he proposed to reduce the burden of the common soldier by cutting out all the foppish Prussian paraphernalia. Unusually for a Russian general and an eighteenth-century commander, he actually wanted to improve the comfort of his cannon-fodder.