Catherine the Great & Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair

Potemkin, toiling in Kherson, was trying to manage the departure of Shagin, who was now delaying the enterprise despite his 200,000 rouble pension. The Tartars would not co-operate while the Khan was still there. Even though he sent his baggage to Petrovsk, the Khan’s officers were discouraging the mullahs from trusting Russia. Pavel Potemkin and Suvorov at last reported from the distant Kuban that the Nogai nomads were ready to take the oath to Catherine. Everything had to be co-ordinated. The Prince was determined that the annexation should be bloodless and at least appear to be the will of the Crimean people. Finally at the end of May, Potemkin wrote that he was leaving Kherson for the Crimea: ‘Goodbye Matushka, darling…The Khan will be off in a trice.’

The Prince arrived in the Crimea and set up camp at Karasubazaar, ready to administer the oath on 28 June, Catherine’s accession day. But it dragged on. While working frantically and exhausting himself, the Prince presented a picture of Oriental languor. ‘I saw him in the Crimea,’ wrote one of his officers, ‘lying on a sofa surrounded by fruits and apparently oblivious of all care – yet amid all the unconcern Russia conquered the peninsula.’³¹

Catherine veered between longing for Potemkin and despairing of him. ‘Neither I nor anyone knows where you are.’ In early June, she missed him. ‘I often deplore that you are there and not here because I feel helpless without you.’ A month later, she was angry: ‘You can imagine how anxious I must be having no news from you for more than five weeks…I expected the occupation of the Crimea by mid-May at the latest and now it’s mid-July and I know no more about it than the Pope of Rome.’³² Then she began to worry that he was dying of the plague. Presumably Potemkin had decided to wait until he could lay the entire Crimea and Kuban at Catherine’s feet.

Across the ancient Crimean Khanate, the murzas and mullahs gathered in their finest robes to take the oath on the Koran to an Orthodox empress over a thousand miles away. Potemkin administered the oath himself, first to the clergy, then to the rest. The most striking sight was in the Kuban far to the east. On the fixed day, 6,000 Tartar tents of the Nogai Horde were pitched out on the Eysk steppe. Thousands of tough little Mongol horses cantered around the encampments. Russian soldiers were casually vigilant. Shagin’s abdication was read to the Nogai, who then took the oath to the Empress in front of Suvorov. They returned to their Hordes, who also recited the oath. Then the feasting began: 100 cattle, 800 rams were cooked and eaten. The Nogai drank vodka – because wine was banned by the Koran. After many toasts and shouts of hurrah, the Cossacks and Nogai competed in horse races. Then the Nogai, having lost their freedom 600 years after Genghis Khan despatched his Hordes westwards, wandered away.³³

On 10 July, the Prince broke his silence to the Empress: ‘In three days, I will congratulate you with the Crimea. All the notables have already sworn, now all the rest will follow.’ On 20/31 July, Catherine received Potemkin’s report that the Crimean Tartars and the two Nogai Hordes had taken the oath. She was so relieved and worn out by the anticipation that she replied coolly, but, as it sank in and she received Potemkin’s explanation, she appreciated his achievement. ‘What a lot of glorious deeds have been accomplished in a short time.’ His letters were immediately filled with his ideas for towns, ports and ships, laced with Classical references to his new territories. His ebullience was always infectious. When he wrote that the cowardly rumours about the plague were spread by poltroons in ‘Spa and Paris’, Catherine laughed at last.³⁴

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A few days later, Serenissimus pulled another golden rabbit out of the hat: in the Caucasus, the Kingdom of Georgia accepted Russian protection. The Caucasus, the isthmus between the Black and Caspian Seas, was a mountaineous patchwork of kingdoms and principalities, dominated by the empires around them – Russia, Turkey and Persia. In the north-west, Potemkin had just annexed the Kuban, ruled by the Crimeans. In the foothills, Russian generals struggled to control the wild Moslem mountaineers in Chechnya and Daghestan. South of the mountains, the Persian and Turkish empires divided the region among themselves. There, the two Orthodox Georgian kingdoms, Kartli-Kacheti and Imeretia, were almost mythical or Biblical in their romantic ferocity, so it was entirely appropriate that their tsars were named respectively Hercules and Solomon.