Catherine the Great & Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair

It is usually claimed that Potemkin concealed the mistakes in Kherson. On the contrary. He confided a catalogue of failures to Catherine. He dismissed Hannibal – apparently for building the fortifications poorly; he could not find any sense in the Admiralty; too much money had been spent; there was not enough wood; the timber they had was unsound. ‘Oh Matushka, what a mess and what dishonesty is here in the Admiralty!’ It was too hot. The buildings still stood in a wilderness. ‘Nobody has even had the sense to plant trees. I’ve now ordered it.’³⁸ He demanded more experts: ‘send the staff according the enclosed list. There aren’t enough smiths here. I’ve sent to Tula for them.’

The town continued to grow. When Kirill Razumovsky visited in 1782, he was amazed by the stone buildings, fortress, battle-ships, ‘spacious suburb’, barracks and Greek merchant ships: ‘Imagine all this and you will understand my bewilderment for not so long ago there was nothing here but a building where beehives are kept for the winter.’³⁹ Francisco de Miranda, the South American revolutionary, who was also temporarily adopted by Potemkin, had the chance to examine Kherson in December 1786. He claimed it had 40,000 inhabitants – 30,000 military and 10,000 civilians. There were 1,200 ‘very good houses built on stone’.⁴⁰ After Potemkin’s death, the English traveller Maria Guthrie and the Russian writer Sumarokov praised the ‘handsome town’⁴¹ with St Catherine’s, fourteen churches, synagogue, 22,000 Orthodox inhabitants and 2,500 Jews.⁴²

Potemkin learned from his mistakes in Kherson. He boasted that his use of soldier-labour saved the state money, but he had a tsar’s conception of budgets. Work had to be done fast, but, if it was not done correctly, like the fortress, he insisted on starting again: results were paramount, costs irrelevant to a semi-emperor who was allowed to treat the imperial Treasury as his own. However, the best rebuttal of Potemkin’s critics is today’s shipbuilding city.^*2

Serenissimus commissioned two full-length icons for Kherson’s fine neo-Classical church – one of St George, the other of St Catherine, he wielding a lance and wearing Roman military uniform, breastplate and red cloak, she in a golden dress and ermine-lined red cloak. His eyes are cast upward, she looks right at us. Then it strikes one: if St Catherine is a passable likeness of the Empress, St George⁴³ is unmistakably Potemkin.^*3

—

If the fall of the Zaporogians made Kherson possible, the end of the Crimean Khanate gave Potemkin his real chance to develop the south. It also made Kherson more of a commercial town and less necessary as a naval base because the Crimea was so well endowed with harbours. Kherson perched on the steppe, while the Crimea was the marketplace of the Black Sea, the hothouse and kitchen-garden of Constantinople.

Potemkin and his Empress longed to follow in Peter the Great’s footsteps. Peter had taken the Baltic from the Swedes, built a Russian fleet there and founded a city there. Now Potemkin had taken the Black Sea from the Tartars and Turks, built a Russian fleet and longed to found a Petersburg of his own. ‘Petersburg established by the Baltic Sea is the Northern capital of Russia, Moscow the middle one and let Kherson of Akhtiar be the southern capital of my Sovereign,’ he wrote to Catherine.⁴⁴ Kherson again! They loved the very word.

First, he attended to the creation of a port for his fleet. Akhtiar, Serenissimus told the Empress from the Crimea in June 1783, ‘is the best harbour in the world’.⁴⁵ It was to be Russia’s new naval base and Potemkin hurried to fortify it and build shipyards,⁴⁶ before he had even fully annexed the Khanate.⁴⁷ The Prince, of course, gave Akhtiar a Greek name: Sebastopol. He immediately founded a city in the ‘natural amphitheatre on the side of a hill’⁴⁸ and ordered his engineer Korsakov to build ‘a strong fortification. The Admiralty must be conveniently located for unloading’ and there must be a road through the peninsula ‘as good as a Roman’ one. ‘I shall name it the Catherine Road.’⁴⁹ The engineer agreed with Potemkin’s choice for the city: ‘The most suitable place there is that which Your Highness has fixed…’.⁵⁰ Only four years later, when Potemkin visited the city with his friend Francisco de Miranda, the South American counted ‘fourteen frigates, three ships-of-the-line of 66 guns and a gunboat’. Miranda immediately grasped the value of Potemkin’s new city: the harbour could hold a fleet of ‘over 100 vessels’. If faced with disaster, a fleet could be repaired within a week.⁵¹ Soon after Potemkin’s death, Maria Guthrie⁵² called it ‘one of the finest ports in the world’. Sebastopol remains Russia’s (and Ukraine’s) greatest naval base.^*4

—