Catherine the Great & Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair

‘Every hour I encountered some fresh, fantastic instance of Prince Potemkin’s Asiatic peculiarities,’ wrote the Comte de Damas, who observed the energetic and creative way the viceroy of the south worked in the late 1780s. ‘He would move a guberniya [province], demolish a town with a view to building it somewhere else, form a new colony or a new industrial centre, and change the administration of a province, all in a spare half-hour before giving his whole attention to the arrangement of a ball or a fête…’.¹ This was how Westerners saw the Prince – a wizardly satrap ordering cities as he commissioned ball-dresses for his mistresses. They always presumed that ‘barbaric’ Russians could never really do anything properly, not like Germans or Frenchmen, so that Potemkin’s work must surely be flawed. When it turned out that Potemkin did do things properly and that his achievements appeared almost miraculous in their imagination and execution, jealous Westerners and Russian enemies propagated the big lie of his sham ‘Potemkin Villages’.

The reality of Potemkin’s achievements in the south, in the fifteen years allotted to him, was remarkable. ‘Attempts have been made to ridicule the first foundations of towns and colonies,’ wrote one of his earliest biographers. ‘Yet such establishments are not the less entitled to our admiration…Time has justified our observations. Listen to the travellers who have seen Kherson and Odessa…’.² The so-called ‘Potemkin Villages’ are cities today with millions of inhabitants.

Russia underwent two massive leaps of expansion in the south: the reigns of Ivan the Terrible, who annexed the Khanates of Astrakhan and Kazan, and of Catherine the Great. Potemkin was, as Pushkin and others recognized, the mastermind and energy behind Catherine’s successes in the south. Potemkin did not invent these policies: as the Russian historian Kliuchevsky put it, colonization is ‘the basic fact of Russian history’. But Potemkin was unique in combining the creative ideas of an entrepreneur with the force of a soldier and the foresight of a statesman. He also brought the south to the north: while, under Panin, Russia pursued the Northern System, under Potemkin the south was Russia’s foreign policy.

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The Prince became the Governor-General (namestvo) of New Russia, Azov, Saratov, Astrakhan and the Caucasus soon after rising to favour, but in the late 1770s and certainly after the annexation of the Crimea, he became the effective co-ruler of the Russian Empire. Just as Diocletian saw that the Roman Empire was so vast that it required Emperors of the East and West, so Catherine let Potemkin run the south and control it absolutely. Potemkin had grown since 1774 – in stature as well as girth. He was made for the wide open steppes of the south and he could not be confined to Court. Petersburg was now too small for the both of them.

Potemkin’s power was both vertical and horizontal, for he was in charge of the army at the College of War and commander-in-chief of all irregular forces, especially the Cossacks. When he began to build the Black Sea Fleet, it reported not to the Admiralty in Petersburg but to him as Grand Admiral. However, most of all, his power depended on his own personality, the prestige of his successes, such as the Crimea, and his ability to create ideas and force their execution – and no longer just on his closeness to Catherine.

Serenissimus deliberately ruled his Viceroyalty – the names and borders of the provinces changed but, essentially, they comprised all the new lands annexed between 1774 and 1783, from the River Bug in the west to the Caspian Sea in the east, from the mountains of the Caucasus, and the Volga across most of the Ukraine almost as far as Kiev – like an emperor. It was unique for a Russian tsar, such as Catherine, to delegate so much power to a consort – but the relationship between them was unparalleled.³

Serenissimus set up his own Court in the south that rivalled and complemented Catherine’s in the north. Like a tsar, he cared for the poor folk, disdained the nobility, and granted ranks and estates in his lands. Potemkin travelled with a royal entourage; he was greeted at towns by all the nobles and townsfolk; his arrival was marked by the firing of cannons and the giving of balls. But it went further than just the trimmings of royalty. When he issued his orders, he did so in the name of the Empress, but he also listed his endless titles and medals as a king might. His commands too were absolute: whether it was a gardener or an engineer, his subordinates usually had a military rank and their orders were military in style. ‘Equalling in his power the mightiest kings,’ recalled Wiegel, ‘I doubt even Napoleon was better obeyed.’⁴