Catherine the Great & Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair

Within weeks, the fighting had started again. But, compared to the feats of the year before, 1771 was to be a disappointment in the theatre of Moldavia and Wallachia, today’s Rumania, where Potemkin served. When the Turks sensibly refused to endure any more of Rumiantsev’s battles, the Field-Marshal spent the year attacking Turkish positions on the lower Danube, pushing into Wallachia. Potemkin did well: given the task of holding the Kraovsky region, he ‘not only repulsed the enemy…but struck at him too. He was the first to head across the Danube.’ On 5 May, he pulled off a minor coup when he attacked the small town of Zimbry on the other side of the Danube, ravaged it, burned enemy provisions and stole the ships of their flotilla, which he brought back to the Russian side of the river. On 17 May, Potemkin defeated and pursued 4,000 Turks near the Ol’ta river – ‘a glorious and famous feat’, according to Rumiantsev, ‘achieved only thanks to Potemkin’s skill and courage’. The Turks attacked him on 27 May but were defeated and driven off. He joined up with Repnin again, and together they drove off a powerful Turkish corps under a seraskier (Turkish equivalent of a field-marshal) on 10 June and then took³⁶ Bucharest.

Some time after this fighting advance, Potemkin was struck down by a dangerous fever, which was endemic in the summer months in these Danubian principalities. It was so serious that ‘only his strong constitution allowed him to recover because he would not accept any help from doctors’, wrote Samoilov. Instead, the prone general put himself in the hands of two Zaporogian Cossacks, whom he charged to take care of him and spray him with cooling water. He had always been interested in the exotic peoples of the Empire – hence his position at the Legislative Commission – but this is our first hint of his special friendship with the Cossacks. He studied the culture of his Cossacks and admired their freedom and joie de vivre. They nicknamed him ‘Gritsko Nechosa’, or ‘Grey Wig’, after the peruke he sometimes wore, and invited him to become an honorary Cossack. A few months later, on 15 April 1772, he wrote to their Hetman to ask for admittance into this martial order. Entered into the lists of the Zaporogian Host in May that year, he wrote to the Hetman: ‘I am delighted.’³⁷

Potemkin had recovered by the time the army crossed the Danube and made a thrust towards the key Turkish fortress of Silistria, which commanded a stretch of the Danube. It was here that Potemkin won the undying hostility of Count Simon Romanovich Vorontsov, a young scion of the family that had reached its peak under Peter III. Born in 1744, the cultured Vorontsov, son of a notoriously corrupt provincial governor (nicknamed Big Pocket), nephew of Peter III’s Chancellor, had been arrested during the coup for supporting Peter III, but he later made a name for himself as the first officer in to the Turkish trenches at Kagul. Like all Vorontsovs, this pudding-faced Anglophile had a marked appreciation of his own credentials but was rightly regarded by Catherine and Potemkin as politically unreliable and spent most of his career in honourable exile as Ambassador to London. Now, outside Silistria, he had to face the indignity of having his Grenadiers rescued from 12,000 Turkish cavalry by a reluctant Potemkin.

Six days later, Potemkin was in turn saved by Vorontsov: ‘not only did we cover him, but we chased those Turks into town’, using three batteries of artillery, and killing ‘lots’. Vorontsov, writing in 1796, cited both fights as evidence of his own virtuosity and Potemkin’s incompetence. Both found it intolerable to be saved by the other. The malice was perfectly symmetrical.³⁸

Silistria did not fall, the army reforded the Danube and there ended Rumiantsev’s tepid campaign. The real action that June was the successful invasion of the weakened Khanate of the Crimea – its army was away on the Danube, facing Rumiantsev – by the Second Army, now commanded by Prince Vasily Dolgoruky.

Catherine was learning that glory was not as quick or cheap as she hoped. The bottomless maw of the army demanded more and more recruits. The harvests were bad. Soldiers’ pay was in arrears. Fever ravaged the army while rashes of bubonic plague broke out across the Ottoman Empire. The Russians feared it would spread through the southern armies. It was time to talk peace with the Ottomans before they forgot Chesme and Kagul. Then, in September 1771, terrible news arrived from Moscow.

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