Catherine the Great & Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair

Potemkin was determined to attract trade to his Viceroyalty. In 1781, Pole Carew discussed a potential trading business with General Hannibal, and with Kherson’s two tycoons – Potemkin’s merchant Faleev and the Frenchman Antoine. Faleev had founded the Black Sea Company to trade with the Ottomans and soon launched his frigate, the Borysthenes. He also had the brandy farm for Potemkin’s three guberniya and supplied the soldiers with meat: Pole Carew reckoned he already made 500,000 roubles a year. Pole Carew listed the goods that could be traded in Kherson – wax, flags, rope, timber,²³ and was tempted by the trading opportunities. ‘It is a bourgeois of Kherson who writes to you,’ he told the Prince.²⁴

Antoine of Marseilles, later Baron de Saint-Joseph, was the town’s shipping magnate. Setting off to Petersburg, he called on the Prince proposing the creation of a trading post and free port at Kherson. Potemkin was delighted,²⁵ and invited Catherine to ‘abolish internal customs duties and to reconsider external ones’.²⁶ However keen he was on Britain, the Prince realized that France dominated Mediterranean trade from Marseilles and this was to have political consequences. By 1786, Antoine told Potemkin that, in the last year, eleven of his French ships had arrived from Marseilles.²⁷

Nonetheless, Kherson was a struggle. Potemkin supervised every detail when he had time: on 3 August 1783, he wrote to his engineer Colonel Gaks in Kherson, ‘I’m confirming for the second time that the building of the hospital must be finished…’. On 14 October, ‘I am surprised that in spite of being assured by you that the hospital is finished, it has not even been begun…’. Then he added: ‘It’s strange to me that sometimes orders are cancelled when they have been confirmed by me.’ In other words, if there was any deception in the building of Kherson, Potemkin was its victim, but he could not be everywhere at once. A week later, he was ordering Gaks to build two baths to fight the plague – ‘one for the absolutely healthy and another for the weak…’ and ‘Don’t forget to build breweries.’ But Hannibal and Gaks were simply not getting things accomplished. Potemkin was frustrated. The next February, Potemkin sacked Gaks and appointed Colonel Nikolai Korsakov, a talented engineer educated in Britain. Potemkin confirmed the annual budget of 233, 740 roubles, but wanted everything finished ‘in a short time’ while insisting on both ‘durability’ and ‘beauty inside’.²⁸ The Prince himself approved every plan, each building façade – from the school to the archbishop’s house to his own residence – and it began to take shape.²⁹

A painting of Kherson in its Museum shows its central square as Potemkin designed it: there is the beautiful church of St Catherine’s. Later, in 1790, the Prince was still beautifying it. When his favourite architect Ivan Starov came to the south, Potemkin ordered him to ‘remake the cupola in the cathedral in Kherson’ exactly like the one in his St Petersburg Palace, ‘and fix a place for the belfry’.³⁰ It was done. The dome and the bell-tower remain exactly as the Prince ordered. Potemkin’s palace stood at right angles to it.

His memoranda to his officials completely destroy the image of Potemkin in most Western accounts.³¹ These are the works of a man aware of the difficulties his officials faced. He was certainly authoritarian, concerned with the smallest details, but surprisingly flexible in giving second chances to overworked officials. Potemkin was aware as anyone that Kherson’s position made it extremely vulnerable to disease. Reading between the lines, it must have been a ghastly posting. Pole Carew recorded that the shipwrights sent from Kronstadt and Petersburg had ‘died off’. When ships from Istanbul and soldiers from across the Empire poured into the area as Potemkin organized the taking of the Crimea, the threat of an epidemic became serious. By 1786, the French merchant Antoine had lost his brothers and many employees. Kherson ‘resembled a vast hospital: one only saw dead and dying’. The Prince tried to control local health and keep the fevers at bay.³² He took special care with hospitals and breweries (to provide drinking water), even telling the inhabitants to eat greens,³³ and personally appointed the doctors³⁴ to his hospitals.^*1

Everything was driven by the manic enthusiasm of the man Catherine called the ‘young Colossus of Kherson’.³⁵ His infectious energy was the only thing that could triumph over the sloth of the Russian bureaucrat: returning from his new town, he spoke to James Harris ‘with raptures of the climate, soil, and situation of Kherson.’³⁶ But every visit revealed more mistakes by his subordinates. That was why he began to spend more and more time away and why Catherine admitted that the trips were worth it, however much she missed him.³⁷