Catherine the Great & Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair

The Russian conscript was already regarded as ‘the finest soldier in the world’, wrote Langeron. ‘He combines all the qualities which go to make a good soldier and hero. He is as abstemious as the Spaniard, as enduring as a Bohemian, as full of national pride as an Englishman and as susceptible to impulse and inspiration as French, Walloons, or Hungarians.’⁶ Frederick the Great was impressed and terrified by Russian courage and endurance during the Seven Years War and coined a word to describe their maniacal ursine savagery – ‘les oursomanes’.⁷ Potemkin served in the cavalry, which had earned its own reputation for bloody bravery, especially since it fought beside Russia’s ferocious irregular light cavalry, the Cossacks.

The Russian army was unique in Europe because, until the American and French Revolutions, armies drilled and fought for kings but not for ideas or nations. Most armies were made up of many nationalities – mercenaries, unwilling recruits and riffraff – who served a flag, not a country. But the Russian army was filled with Russian peasants who were recruited in mass levées from the roughly seven million souls available. This was seen as the reason for their almost mindless bravery.⁸

The officers, either Russian landowners addicted to gambling and debauch, or German, or later, French soldiers of fortune, were notoriously cruel: General Mikhail Kamensky, an extreme example, actually bit his soldiers. But they were also extraordinarily brave.⁹ The characteristics of their peasant chair du cannon – brutality, discipline, self-sufficiency, endurance, patriotism and stoicism in the face of appalling suffering – made the Russian army a formidable fighting force. ‘The Turks are tumbling like ninepins,’ went the Russian saying; ‘but, through the grace of God, our men stand firm, though headless.’¹⁰

Some contemporaries believed that war in the eighteenth century was become less bloody. Certainly, the dynasties of Europe, Habsburgs and Bourbons, at least pretended to fight according to the rules of aristocratic etiquette. But, for the Russians, wars against the Turks were different. After the centuries in which the Moslem Tartars, and then Turks, had threatened Orthodox Russia, the Russian peasant regarded this as a crusade. Havoc – the medieval giving of no quarter – was the order of battle.

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Potemkin had only just arrived in Bar when the phoney war, giving both the unprepared Turks and Russians time to amass their forces, ended abruptly. On 16 June 1769, some 12,000 Tartar horsemen, under the command of the Crimean Khan, the Sultan’s ally, who were raiding the Russian Ukraine, crossed the Dniester and attacked Potemkin’s camp. Even then, the Tartars, armed with lassos and bows and arrows, were a vision from another age but they were the only Turkish forces ready for war. The Tartar Khan, Kirim Giray, a direct descendant of Genghis Khan, was an aggressive and fearless cavalry commander. He was accompanied by Baron de Tott, a French officer seconded to Istanbul to improve the Turkish forces. He has left his account of this medieval expedition – the last of its kind. Five hundred years after Genghis Khan, the Crimean Tartars, the descendants of those Mongol hordes, were still Europe’s finest horsemen. As they swept out of the Crimea through the Ukraine and towards the Russian troops still stationed in southern Poland, they must have looked and sounded as terrifying as their Mongol ancestors. Yet, like most of the irregular cavalry, they were undisciplined and usually too distracted by booty to be much strategic use. But the raid bought the Turks time to build up their armies, which were said to be 600,000 strong.

In his first battle, Potemkin engaged these wild Tartar and Turkish horsemen and repulsed them. He acquitted himself well, for ‘Chamberlain Potemkin’ appears in the list of those who distinguished themselves. This was the beginning of Potemkin’s run of success. On 19 June, he fought again in the Battle of Kamenets and took part in further skirmishing, helping General Golitsyn take Kamenets.¹¹ In St Petersburg Catherine celebrated these minor engagements with a ‘Te Deum’ on Sunday, 19 July, but the vacillating Golitsyn faltered before Khotin. Furious and impatient, in August the Empress recalled him. There are hints that Potemkin, via the Orlovs, played some part in the intrigue that dispensed with Golitsyn.¹² But, if he was laughably slow, Golitsyn was at least lucky. He was opposed by a Grand Vizier, Mehmed Emin, who was happier reading Islamic poetry than slicing off heads. So Catherine was embarrassed when, before her orders had arrived at the front, Golitsyn pulled himself together and crossed the Dniester.