Catherine the Great & Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair

Potemkin’s agents were preparing the Tartars in the Crimea and the Kuban while his troops got ready to fight the Ottomans. Balmain was fixing the easiest piece of the puzzle: on 19 April, he procured the abdication of Shagin Giray in Karasubazaar in the Crimea itself, in return for generous subsidies and possibly another throne. ‘My dove, my Prince,’ exulted Catherine when she heard this news.²⁷ When the Prince finally reached Kherson in early May, he found that, as ever, Russian bureaucracy was incapable of achieving much without his driving energy. ‘Lady Matushka,’ he reported to Catherine in early May, ‘Having reached Kherson, I’m exhausted as a dog and unable to find any sense in the Admiralty. Everything is desolate and there’s not a single proper report.’ Like any country boy, his thoughts about the ministers of Europe were populated with dogs, wolves and toads.

The Prince now threw himself, in a whirl of activity and anxiety, into seizing the Crimea without outside interference. The archives show this multitalented dynamo at work. Potemkin’s rescripts to his generals – Balmain in the Crimea, Suvorov and Pavel Potemkin in the Kuban – took care of every detail: the Tartars were to be treated kindly; regiments were positioned; artillery was to be brought up in case he needed to besiege Ochakov; a spy was on his way (‘arrest him and send him to me’). When a colonel was too deferential to the deposed Khan, he received a dose of Potemkinian sarcasm: ‘Are you the Khan’s butler or an officer?’ And he specified every step of the swearing of the oath of allegiance.²⁸

Meanwhile to the east of the Crimea and the Kuban, south of the Caucasus mountains, he conducted negotiations with two Georgian kings about a Russian protectorate and with a Persian satrap, along with Armenian rebels, about fostering an independent Armenian state. On top of all this, an epidemic of plague struck the Crimea, brought in from Constantinople, so quarantines had to be enforced. ‘I order precautions against it – repeat the basics, inspire hygiene, visit the plague hospitals thus setting an example,’ Potemkin wrote to Bezborodko. These were just some of the myriad projects Potemkin was conducting at this time. ‘Only God knows how I’ve worn myself out.’ As if this was not enough for one man, he monitored the Powers of Europe – and coped with Catherine.²⁹ He chided her: ‘You’ve always shown me favour…so do not decline the one I need most – take care of your health.’

Frederick the Great now attempted to ruin Catherine’s plans by egging on the French to stop her. Potemkin dared the old Prussian ‘huckster…to send French troops here – we’d teach them a lesson in the Russian way’. King Gustavus of Sweden, who hoped to emulate his hero Alexander the Great, insisted on visiting Catherine, looking for chances to take advantage of Russian trouble with Turkey to reclaim Sweden’s lost Baltic Empire. But his visit was delayed when his horse threw him at a military parade and he broke his arm. ‘What a clumsy hero,’ Catherine chuckled to Potemkin. Alexander the Great never made such a fool of himself. By the time Gustavus arrived for his visit, the Crimean cake was baked and eaten.

The Comte de Vergennes, the French Foreign Minister, sought out the Austrian envoy to Paris to co-ordinate a reaction to Russian plans. Joseph II, pushed to a decision by Catherine and afraid of missing out on Ottoman gains, suddenly rallied and informed the horrified Vergennes of the Russo-Austrian Treaty. Without support from its ally Austria, an exhausted France lacked the will to act. As for Britain, relieved to have escaped its American quicksand, Lord Grantham told Harris that if ‘France means to be quiet about the Turks…why should we meddle? No time to begin a fresh broil.’

Joseph’s alliance proved decisive. ‘Your prediction has come true, my cheerful clever friend,’ the Empress told her consort. ‘Appetite comes with eating.’ So it looked as if the partners would get away with it.³⁰

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Potemkin was so embroiled in his many activities that he now ceased writing his usual letters to Catherine. She fretted and wrote repeatedly throughout May and June, snapping, ‘While you complain there’s no news from me, I thought it’s me who had no news from you for a long time.’ The two were getting irritated with each other, as they always did during political crises. She wanted to know if the Khan had left the Crimea so that the Tartars could take the oath of allegiance and she could publish her Manifesto on the annexation.