Catherine the Great & Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair

Potemkin’s first town was designed to be both the base for his new Black Sea Fleet, which so far existed only in a small way in the minor Russian ports of the Sea of Azov, and an entrepôt for Mediterranean trade. The placing of this port was a difficult decision because Russian’s gains in 1774 had given it a narrow corridor to the Black Sea. Its access was via the mouth of the Dnieper river, one of the great waterways of Rus, which reached the Black Sea through a narrow, shallow estuary called the Liman. At the end of the Liman on the Kinburn spit, Potemkin had built a small fortress. But the Ottomans kept the powerful fortress–town of Ochakov on the other bank, which effectively controlled the delta. There was no ideal place that was both defensible and a natural harbour. The naval engineers favoured Glubokaya Pristan, a deep harbour, but it was indefensible, so Potemkin chose a site further up the Dneiper where a fortress named Alexandershanz already stood. There was an island in the river that protected the port and docks. The Dnieper rapids made it hard to reach without using ‘camels’, while a bar beneath the town obstructed access to the Sea. Worse than that, Kherson was on the edge of the baking-hot steppes and marshy waterways and thousands of versts from the nearest ship timber, let alone food supplies.

The obstacles were overwhelming, but Potemkin repeatedly overcame them to build his city. No one in Petersburg believed it would be completed. Not for nothing did Catherine write to him: ‘Kherson will never be built without you.’ Simultaneously, the jealousy that was to ruin Potemkin’s reputation rose even before the first stone had been laid. ‘The foundation of Kherson will become famous,’ fumed Zavadovsky. ‘Its creator loves his project and pushes it.’¹⁷ He was right: Potemkin almost willed the town into existence and drove Hannibal relentlessly. By August, the Russo-Abyssinian had established twelve teams of workers and bought timber on the upper Dnieper in Russian Belorussia and Poland. Everything had to be floated down the river to Kherson.

Potemkin hired over 500 carpenters and thousands of workers, founded the shipyards and planned the town. The first keels of warships were laid down in May 1779. Two more were on the way by 1781. Serenissimus decided to employ the army, which started with its own wooden barracks, using mud wattle for the walls at first. Next he imported 1,000 criminals to work the quarries.¹⁸ Then he gave the merchant Faleev his big chance, persuading him to dynamite the rocky Dneiper rapids in return for a slice of Kherson’s future trade. Faleev, who invested in its success, undertook this major work. Potemkin supplied the gunpowder. By 1783, Faleev had succeeded to the extent that some barges could sail straight down to Kherson. The Prince rewarded him with the rank of major, raising him to nobility.¹⁹

Potemkin’s critics claimed that little was built and nothing was done well – and history has believed them. Fortunately, the well-born Westerns who visited Petersburg on their Grand Tours met Potemkin, who always directed them to Kherson. One of the first of these was a young English engineer, Samuel Bentham, brother of the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy, who was to work with Potemkin for five years. In 1780, he saw Kherson already had 180 houses and had launched one sixty-four-gunned ship-of-the-line and five frigates, and marvelled: ‘He chose the spot not above two…years ago when there was not even a hut here.’ The timber, he noted, had to be floated down from a town in Poland that was later to become famous – Chernobyl.²⁰

Another intrepid Englishman, and a friend of Samuel Bentham, was Reginald Pole Carew, an Oxford graduate and Cornish landowner in his late twenties, who witnessed the next stage. He was the sort of young man who would later play the Great Game. Potemkin adopted Pole Carew, showing him his estates and fabriks (factories) round Petersburg before he headed south. Pole Carew’s notes, still unpublished, read as if he was either writing a book or engaged in amateur espionage. By the time he arrived, there were already 300 houses in Kherson. Apart from nine regiments of soldiers, ‘up to now the town is mainly inhabited by Polish Jews and Greeks…Soldiers, sailors, peasants are all being used…in building,’ but he noticed that the work on the fortifications was being done too fast ‘for fear of disgusting higher powers’.²¹ These were his real feelings, but he also tactfully told the Prince that ‘what I see here surpasses imagination’.²²