Catherine the Great & Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair

At dawn on 4 June 1775, Russian troops under Potemkin’s orders approached the Sech, surrounded it and ordered it to surrender or face destruction. The Sech that he called ‘the foolish rabble’ surrendered without resistance. Potemkin wrote Catherine’s Manifesto for her, which was published on 3 August 1775 – ‘all their violence should be cited – the reasons why such a harmful society will be destroyed’.⁸ The Zaporogians were not killed: only three leaders, including their wealthy Hetman Kalischevsky, were despatched to the Arctic monastery of Solovki on the White Sea. They were resettled as Astrakhan Cossacks, but many of them fled to fight for the Turks: Potemkin was to lure them back in the 1780s.⁹ Nor was the Sech alone: the Yaik Host was moved and renamed; Don Cossacks were reformed too and brought under Potemkin’s direct control: he appointed their new hetman and the committee that would manage their civil affairs.¹⁰ The overmighty Don Hetman, Efremov, was arrested, though Potemkin protected him and his family.¹¹

Potemkin immediately suggested that the loyal Zaporogians be formed into special regiments. Catherine feared the Cossacks after Pugachev, so he bided his time, but he built a Cossack flotilla on the Caspian and Azov Seas.¹² He treated the Cossacks so kindly that noblemen grumbled that he was in love with them. He certainly surrounded himself with loyal Zaporogians. He also made sure that runaway serfs, found among these frontiersmen, should not be returned to their masters. It says much that Potemkin was loved by them in his lifetime: he earned the title ‘Protector of the Cossacks’.¹³

Yet the destruction of the Zaporogians is always listed as one of Potemkin’s crimes – especially in modern Ukraine, where the Sech is regarded as the forerunner of the Ukrainian state. But the Sech and other Hosts were doomed after Pugachev, their territory was unsettled, uncultivated and in the way of Russia’s drive to the Black Sea. Their removal allowed the annexation of the Crimea. Serenissimus is criticized for removing treasures from Zaporogian churches and distributing the lands to his cronies – yet, since he was not there himself, he ordered General Tekeli to inventory all church plate and give it to the Church.¹⁴ (Anyway, the majority of their jewels were themselves stolen.) The distribution and cultivation of land was the entire point of the annexation. He resettled these lands with Greeks who had fought for Orlov-Chesmensky and, later, state peasants from the Russian interior, and began building fortresses to protect them. Indeed, one modern historian argues that it was cultivation of these steppes that provided Russia with the resources and food supply to defeat Napoleon in 1812.¹⁵

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On 31 May 1778, Catherine approved Potemkin’s plan for a Black Sea port called Kherson, a sonorous name, ringing with his neo-Classical and Orthodox dreams of Khersoneses. This was the city made possible by the peace with Turkey and the liquidation of the Zaporogians.¹⁶ Docks were ordered. Carpenters were demanded from all over the empire. On 25 July, the Prince chose one of the Admiralty’s officers to be its first governor – Ivan Abramovich Hannibal. Probably, Potemkin was attracted to the exotic history of this man and his connection to Peter the Great.

He was the half-black eldest son of Peter the Great’s famous blackamoor, Abraham Hannibal, an Abyssinian prince bought in Istanbul for the Tsar and adopted by him. Naming him for obvious reasons after Scipio’s adversary, Peter educated his ward, promoted him and stood as godfather to his son Ivan. Pushkin, who wrote the (uncompleted) ‘Blackamoor of Peter the Great’, was the great-nephew of Ivan Hannibal. Pushkin’s grandfather Osip Hannibal was a poor father, so the poet’s mother was actually brought up in the household of Potemkin’s first governor of Kherson. Ivan Hannibal was as proud of his ancestry as Pushkin. When he died in 1801, the tombstone read: ‘The sultriness of Africa bore him, the cold calmed his blood.’ His portrait in the Kherson State Historical Museum shows the dark skin and fine Abyssinian features of his father and the straight hair and stockiness of his Russian mother. Now Catherine ordered Hannibal to proceed with this massive task.