Catherine the Great & Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair

All this was undoubtedly eccentric, but an ability to turn his ideas into reality was at the heart of Potemkin’s genius. Much that seemed ridiculous after his death seemed possible during his life: the scale on which he created not just cities but the Black Sea Fleet sounded unlikely but he alone made it happen. So the university and city could have been built – but only in his lifetime. His vision was a noble one, far wider than just the conservatoire: it was to be an international Orthodox college where Potemkin believed ‘young people’ from Poland, Greece, Wallachia and Moldavia could study.⁷⁶ As ever with the Prince, his choice of students was closely connected to his aims for the Empire and for himself. He was always trying to train better sailors for his ships. In 1787, after Catherine’s visit, he united all the naval academies in the region and Petersburg and moved them to Ekaterinoslav. This was to be the academy of the Greek Project, the school for Potemkin’s kingdoms.⁷⁷

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The work did not begin until mid-1787, then was delayed by the war so that little of it was built. But not as little as everyone thinks. In 1790, Starov arrived in the south, and laid new plans for the whole city, especially its cathedral and the Prince’s Palace, all approved by Potemkin, on 15 February 1790. The professors’ residences and the administrative buildings for the university were finished. By 1792, there were 546 state buildings and just 2,500 inhabitants.⁷⁸ Its Governor, Vasily Kahovsky, reported to the Empress after the Prince’s death that the town was laid out and continuing. Without its master, would it continue?⁷⁹ By 1815, a travelling official reported that it was ‘more like some Dutch colony than a provincial administrative centre’.⁸⁰ Yet something of his Athens remains.

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Ekaterinoslav never became a southern Petersburg; its university was never the Oxford of the steppes. The gap between hope and reality made this Potemkin’s biggest failure and it has been used to discredit much else that was done well. Yet none of the historians of the last two centuries had visited Ekaterinoslav, which, like Sebastopol, was a closed city in Soviet times. When one looks more closely at the city, now called Dniepropetrovsk, it becomes clear its position was admirably chosen on the high and green bank of a bend of the Dnieper, where the great river is almost a mile wide. Potemkin’s main Catherine Street became the modern Karl Marx Prospekt, still called ‘the longest, widest, most elegant avenue in all the Russians’ by locals. (William Hastie, the Scottish architect, expanded on this grid in his 1816 city plan.)⁸¹

In the middle of the city stands an eighteenth-century church, now newly alive with Orthodox worshippers. Its name – Church of the Transformation – is the one Potemkin suggested in 1784. It is a grand and imposing edifice, completely in proportion to the size of its city. It has a high spire, Classical pillars and golden cupola, based on Starov’s original plans. Begun in 1788 during the war, completed long after Potemkin’s death, in 1837, there stands the Prince’s noble cathedral in the midst of the city that was supposed never to have been built.⁸² Not far from the church is a hideous yellow triumphal arch of Soviet design that leads to Potemkin Park, which still contains the massive Potemkin Palace.⁸³ It was to be another eighty years after Potemkin’s death before musical conservatoires were opened in St Petersburg and Moscow. But Ekaterinoslav was to flourish most under Soviet planning when it became a toiling industrial centre – as Potemkin had wanted.^*5

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Potemkin’s cities advanced as he gained territory. The last cities he sponsored were made possible by the conquests of the Second Turkish War – Nikolaev, by the fall of the fortress of Ochakov, and Odessa, by the push round the Black Sea.

On 27 August 1789, the Prince scrawled out the order to found Nikolaev, named after St Nikolai, the saint of seafarers on whose day Potemkin finally stormed Ochakov. Built on a high, cool and breezy spot where the Ingul river meets the Bug about twenty miles upriver from Kherson and fifty from the Black Sea, Nikolaev was the best planned and most successful of his cities (except Odessa).

It was built by Faleev on Potemkin’s precise orders, sweeping in vision, precise in detail. In a twenty-one point memorandum, he ordered Faleev to build a monastery, move naval headquarters from Kherson to Nikolaev, construct a military school for 300, fund a church from the income of local taverns, recast the broken bell of the Mejigorsky Convent, adding copper to it, cultivate the land ‘according to the English method as practised by three British-educated assistants of Professor Livanov’, build hospitals and resthomes for invalids, create a free port, cover all fountains with marble, build a Turkish bath and an admiralty – and then establish a town council and a police force.