Catherine the Great & Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair

Catherine, whose visions of Classicism and altruism were the same as his, approved his plans.⁶⁵ Serenissimus considered possible designs for over a year. Finally, in 1786, the French architect Claude Giroir produced his design for a central square and a grid of streets at right angles to the Dnieper, but Potemkin’s architect Starov perfected the final plans. In January 1787, the Prince proudly displayed them to Francisco de Miranda, who was impressed with their ‘Roman grandeur and architectural taste’. Potemkin wanted to employ 16,000 workmen for nine or ten years. Miranda wondered if it would ever be completed.⁶⁶

Nothing in his career provoked such mockery as Ekaterinoslav. The building of a town here was necessary to develop the empty Zaporogian steppes, but the sin was its grandeur. Even the anti-Potemkin lies are interesting because of the light they shed on the extent to which Potemkin’s enemies would go to blacken his name. Most histories claim Potemkin founded Ekaterinoslav in an unhealthy place and almost immediately had to move it, due to his own incompetence. It is true that in 1778, six years earlier, he had allowed a provincial governor to found a settlement for Armenians and Greeks, the Crimean refugees, on the River Kilchen, using the name ‘Ekaterinoslav’. Now he simply took the name for his ‘famous city’, but he did not move the original one, which already had Greek, Armenian and Catholic quarters with three churches⁶⁷ and almost 3,000 inhabitants. He simply renamed it Novomoskovsk.⁶⁸

His enemies said the Prince planned to build a cathedral in the middle of this heretofore empty steppe larger than St Peter’s in Rome, like the African dictator of a penniless state building the biggest cathedral in the world in the middle of the jungle. Ever since, historians, even Potemkin’s only modern biographer George Soloveytchik, have repeated this embarrassing ambition as a sign of the Prince’s overweening delusions of grandeur.⁶⁹ However, Potemkin may have mentioned St Peter’s but he never actually proposed building it: in his letter to Catherine, he wrote, ‘I imagine here an excellent cathedral, a kind of imitation of St Paul’s-outside-the-walls-of-Rome, devoted to the Transfiguration of God, as a sign of the transformation of this land by your care, from a barren steppe to an ample garden, and from the wilderness of animals to a home, welcoming people from all lands.’⁷⁰ San Paolo-fuorile-mura was admittedly an ambitious undertaking, but not quite as absurd as St Peter’s. It is unlikely Catherine would ever have signed off on a copy of St Peter’s nor assigned the huge tranches of two and three million roubles to the development of the south if Potemkin’s ideas were so ludicrous. Somehow, St Peter’s was substituted.

The only part of the city that existed from the beginning was the University of Ekaterinoslav, with its own musical conservatoire.⁷¹ He immediately moved the Greek gymnasium, founded on his Ozerki estate as part of the Greek Project, to his New Athens, saying he had saved enough to rebuild the school there.⁷² The conservatoire was closest to his lyrical heart. ‘It’s the first time’, sneered Cobenzl to Joseph in November 1786, ‘someone has decided to establish a corps de musique in a town before it’s even been built.’⁷³ Potemkin hired Giuseppe Sarti, his personal composer–conductor, as the first head of the conservatoire. It was not just Sarti: the Prince really was hiring musical staff in Italy before a city was constructed. ‘Enclosed, I have the honour of presenting you, Monseigneur, the bill of 2800 Roubles for the order of Your Highness,’ wrote a certain Castelli from Milan on 21 March 1787, ‘to Monsieur Joseph Canta who has passed them to the four Professors of Music…They plan to leave for Russia on the 26th…’.⁷⁴ The destiny of the four Milanese professors is unknown.

In 1786, he ordered local Governor Ivan Sinelnikov to enrol two painters, Neretin and Bukharov, as professors of art at the university, with salaries of 150 roubles. Even in the midst of the war in January 1791, he ordered Ekaterinoslav’s Governor to employ a Frenchman named de Guienne as ‘historian at the Academy’ on a salary of 500 roubles. As Potemkin told Sinelnikov, the public schools had to be improved to provide the university with good students. Overall, 300,000 roubles was assigned to the educational establishments alone.⁷⁵ This was derided. Yet it is hard to fault Potemkin’s priorities when he paid as much attention to teachers as to battleships.