Catherine the Great & Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair

51 Wiegel vol 1 p 43. RP 4.2 p 214. RP 2.1 p 5. She kept a shrine to GAP at her famous estate, Belayatserkov. There is a portrait of her with her children, now at the Alupka Palace in the Crimea, in which the bust beside her is said to be GAP. It is possible that GAP’s heart is buried at Belayatserkov. Branicka also built a fabulous park that still exists in Ukraine called Alexandria. She was much loved for giving villages to her peasants and endowing them with their own agricultural banks to finance their farming.

52 RP 1.1 p 30. RP 1.1 p 29. RP 3.1 p 10. RP 1.2 p 120. Skavronskaya was also made Grand Mistress of Court by Alexander I. Her husband Count Giulio P. Litta was a high official under Alexander and Nicholas I

53 Yusupov pp 6–9. RP 1.1 p 10 and RP 4.2 206. See also T. Yusupova in Russkiy Biographicheskiy Slovar (1916).

54 Anthony L. H. Rhinelander, Prince Michael Vorontsov, Viceroy to the Tsar pp 75–6. Henri Troyat, Pushkin pp 214–25. Vorontsov personally commanded one of some of Nicholas I’s campaigns against Shamyl and the Chechen/Daghestan Murids who defied Russian attempts to control the North Caucasus. Vorontsov and Lise appear in ‘Hadji Murat’ by Leo Tolstoy: see Tolstoy, Master and Man and Other Stories (Harmondsworth 1977).

55 RP 1.1 p 30. RP 1.1 p 29. RP 3.1 p 10. RP 1.2 p 120. Alan Palmer, Metternich pp 36, 136, 137, 148, 322.

56 The actual Potemkin family multiplied in the nineteenth century, but not the lines closest to the Prince’s story. Pavel Potemkin’s son Count Grigory died at Borodino, while his other son Sergei married but had no children. Mikhail Potemkin had two children by Tatiana Engelhardt, but their one son, Alexander, had no children. The other lines, however, multiplied exceedingly. The last of one noble line was Alexander Alexeievich, who was the ultimate marshal of the Smolensk nobility and was killed by the Bolsheviks in 1918 when they captured him in the Crimea as he tried to escape Russia. His daughter, Natalia Alexandrovna Potemkina, lived on in Simferopol, one of the Prince’s cities, and died in 2000. Thus ended one noble branch of Potemkins.

57 Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891–1924 pp 217, 515–16.

58 Kenneth Rose, George V p 320.

59 Vallentin p 523.

60 Author’s visit to Golia Monastery in Iaşi, Rumania, October 1998. Fanica Ungureanu, Professor of Economic Science, Iaşi University, showed the author the place.

61 Author’s visit to Potemkin monument, Republic of Moldova, 1998.

62 RGADA 11.966.1–2 pp 1, 2, Popov to CII October 1791 and 27 March 1792.

63 RGADA 11.956.1, Popov to CII, p 2; Popov to CII 27 March 1792. ZOOID 9: 390–3. Gravestone monuments in Kherson Fortress Church including Soldatsky. RGADA 16.696.2.35, General-en-Chef Kahovsky to CII 27 February 1792; p 35, Kahovsky to CII 2 February 1792. RGVIA 1287.12.126.31 and 21 (1823) CII’s rescripts on GAPT’s monuments quoted in ‘New Work of I. P. Martos’, in E. V. Karpova, Cultural Monuments, New Discoveries pp 355–64.

64 ZOOID 9: 390–3, about the gravestone monuments of Kherson Fortress Church, including Soldatsky. ZOOID 5 (1863): 1006, about the place of GAP’s burial by I. Andreevsky: Emperor Paul I to Alexander Kurakin 27 March 1798 and Kurakin to the local Govenor Seletsky, received on 18 April 1798. It is ironic that this was the same A. B. Kurakin whose letter to his friend Bibikov, when he was in Paul’s entourage on his trip to Europe in 1781–2, had ensured that Paul was excluded from power as long as Catherine lived. On Paul and GAP’s body, see AAE 20: 331, Langeron, 1824: ‘The commander of the fortress had the courage to disobey but reported that [Paul’s] order had been obeyed’. Langeron was close to Paul’s court.