Catherine the Great & Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair

Still nothing happened. He confronted her about the meaning of the summons. She replied something like: ‘Calme-toi. I am going to think about what you have said and wait until I tell you my decision.’³ Perhaps she wanted him to master the intricacies of her political situation first, perhaps she was teasing him, hoping that their relationship would grow when the moment was right. No one believed in the benefits of careful preparation like Catherine. Most likely, she simply wanted him to force the issue, for she needed his fearless confidence as much as his brains and love. Potemkin learned fast enough why Catherine needed him now: he would have known much of it already. But when he was briefed by the Empress and his friends, he must have realized she was embroiled in her gravest crisis – politically, militarily, romantically – since the day she came to power. It had started, just a few months earlier, in the land of the Yaik Cossacks.

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On 17 September 1773, a charismatic Don Cossack appeared before an enthused crowd of Cossacks, Kalmyks and Tartars near Yaiksk, the headquarters of the Yaik Cossacks, thousands of versts south-east of Moscow in another world from Petersburg, and declared that he was the Emperor Peter III, who had not been murdered, but was there to lead them against the evil Catherine. He called her ‘the German, the Devil’s daughter’. The soi-disant ‘Emperor’ was really Emelian Pugachev, a lean, swarthy army deserter with a black goatee beard and brown hair. He did not even look like Peter III. But that did not matter because no one in those remote parts would have recognized the real thing: Pugachev, born around 1740 (almost the same age as Potemkin), had fought in the Seven Years War and at the siege of Bender. He had grievances against the Government, had been arrested and had escaped.

He promised all things to all men – he was the ‘sweet-tongued, merciful, soft-hearted Russian Tsar’. He had already displayed the ‘Tsar’s marks’ on his body to convince these simple angry people that he bore the stigmata they expected of their anointed ruler. He promised them ‘lands, waters, woods, dwellings, grasses, rivers, fishes, bread…’, and anything else he could possibly conjure.

This exceedingly generous political manifesto proved irresistible to many of those who listened to him – but especially to the Yaik Cossacks. The Cossacks were martial communities or Hosts of freemen, outcasts, escaped criminals, runaway serfs, religious dissidents, deserters, bandits of mixed Tartar and Slavic blood who had fled to the frontiers to form armed bands on horseback, living by plunder and rapine, and raising horses. Each Host – the Don, the Yaik, the Zaporogian and their Polish and Siberian brothers – developed its own culture, but they were generally organized as primitive frontier democracies who elected a hetman or ataman in times of war.

For centuries, they played the middle ground, allying with Poland, Lithuania or Sweden against Muscovy, with Russia against the Crimean khans or Ottoman sultans. In the eighteenth century, they remained as likely to rob Russians as Turks but were useful to Russia as border guards and light cavalry. However, the tension between the Russian state and the Cossacks was growing. These Cossacks were concerned with their own problems – they were worried that they were going to be incorporated into the regular army with its drilling discipline and that they would have to shave their beards. The Yaik Cossacks particularly were concerned with recent disputes about fishing rights. A mutiny had been harshly suppressed just a year earlier. But there was more: the Russo-Turkish War was now in its fifth full year and its costs in men and money fell especially on the peasantry. These people wanted to believe in their scraggly ‘Peter III’.

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Pugachev ignited this powderkeg. In Russia, the tradition of ‘pretenderism’ was still strong. In the seventeenth-century ‘Time of Troubles’, the ‘False Dmitri’ had even ruled in Moscow. In a vast primitive country where the tsars were all-powerful and all-good and the simple folk believed them to be touched by God, the image of this kind, Christ-like ruler, wandering among the people and then emerging to save them, was a powerful element of Russian folklore.^* This was not as odd as it might sound: England had had its share of pretenders, such as Perkin Warbeck, who in 1490 claimed to be Richard, Duke of York, one of the murdered ‘Princes in the Tower’.