Catherine the Great & Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair

In Rumania, thanks to Professor Razvan Magureanu, Professor of Electrical Engineering at the Polytechnic University of Bucharest, and Ioan Vorobet who drove us to Iasi, guarded us and made it possible to enter Moldova. In Iasi: Professor Fanica Ungureanu, authority on the Golia Monastery, and Alexander Ungureanu, Professor of Geography at Iasi University, without whose help I would never have found the site of Potemkin’s death. In Warsaw, Poland: Peter Martyn and Arkadiusz Bautz-Bentkowski and the AGAD staff. In Paris: the staff of AAE in the Quai d’Orsay. Karen Blank researched and translated German texts. Imanol Galfarsoro translated the Miranda diary from Spanish. In Telavi, Georgia: Levan Gachechiladze, who introduced me to Lida Potemkina.

In Britain, I have many to thank for things great and small: my agent Georgina Capel, the Chairman of Orion, Anthony Cheetham, the Publisher of Weidenfeld & Nicolson, Ion Trewin, and Lord and Lady Weidenfeld. Thanks to John Gilkes for creating the maps. Great thanks are owed to Peter James, my legendary editor, for applying his wisdom to this book. The staff of the British Library, British Museum, the Public Records Office, the London Library, the Library of the School of Eastern European and Slavonic Studies, the Cornwall and Winchester Records Offices and the Antony Estate. I thank my father, Dr Stephen Sebag-Montefiore MD, for his diagnosis of Potemkin’s illnesses and singular psychology, and my mother, April Sebag-Montefiore, for her insights into Potemkin’s personal relationships. I have a special thank you for Galina Oleksiuk, my Russian teacher, without whose lessons this book could not have been written. I would also like to thank the following for their help or kind answers to my questions: Neal Ascherson, Vadim Benyatov, James Blount, Alain de Botton, Dr John Casey, the Honourable L. H. L. (Tim) Cohen, Professor Anthony Cross, Sir Edward Dashwood, Ingelborga Dapkunaite, Baron Robert Dimsdale, Professor Christopher Duffy, Lisa Fine, Princess Katya Golitsyn, Prince Emmanuel Golitsyn, David Henshaw, Professor Lindsey Hughes, Tania Illingworth, Anna Joukovskaya, Paul and Safinaz Jones, Dmitri Khankin, Professor Roderick E. McGrew, Giles MacDonogh, Noel Malcolm, the Earl of Malmesbury, Neil McKendrick the Master of Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge, Dr Philip Mansel, Sergei Alexandrovich Medvedev, Charles and Patty Palmer-Tomkinson, Dr Monro Price, Anna Reid, Kenneth Rose, the Honourable Olga Polizzi, Hywell Williams, Andre Zaluski. The credit for their gems of knowledge belong to them; the blame for any mistakes rest entirely on me.

Last but not least, I must thank my wife, Santa, for enduring our ménage-à-trois with Prince Potemkin for so long.

NOTES

 

Dates are given in the Old Style Julian Calendar used in Russia which was eleven days earlier than the New Style Gregorian used in the West. In some cases both dates are given.

Money: 1 rouble contained 100 kopecks. Approximately 4 roubles = £1 Sterling = 24 French Livres in the 1780s. At that time, an English gentleman could live on £300 a year, a Russian officer on 1,000 roubles.

Distances and measurements: 1 verst equalled 0.663 miles or 1.06 km. 1 desyatina equalled 2.7 acres.

Names and proper names: I have used the most recognizable form of most names, which means that absolute consistency is impossible in this area – so I apologize in advance to those offended by my decisions. The subject of this book is ‘Potemkin’, even though in Russian the pronunciation is closer to ‘Patiomkin’. I have used the Russian form of names except in cases where the name is already well known in its English form; for example, the Tsarevich Pavel Petrovich is usually called Grand Duke Paul; Semyon Romanovich Vorontsov is Simon Vorontsov; the Empress is Catherine, not Ekaterina. I usually spell Peter and other first names in the English form, instead of Piotr and so on. I have used the Russian feminized form of names such as Dashkova instead of Dashkov. In Polish names, such as Branicki, I have left the name in its more polonized form, pronounced ‘Branitsky’. Thus, in the feminine, I have used the Russian for Skavronskaya but the Polish for Branicka. Once someone is known by a suffix or title, I try to use it, so that A. G. Orlov is Orlov-Chesmensky once he had received this surname.

PREFACE TO THE VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION

 

For two centuries Catherine the Great and Potemkin were relegated to the somewhat shady, lascivious and romantic alleyways of history, mocked as power-mad, sex-mad or farcically inept. More recently, scholars have rehabilitated them as statesmen, and now again, in the twenty-first century, with their conquests catching the interest of President Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin, they find themselves at the centre of the crossroads where history meets current events.