Catherine the Great & Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair

The new leaders, often trained in the elite KGB, have no interest in Catherine and Potemkin’s culture, enlightenment and humanity, which have little in common with their intolerant authoritarianism. But they are interested in their autocratic and imperial legacy, particularly in the south. The eighteenth-century couple and the new masters of the Kremlin share a belief in the prestige and discipline of the state; the essential facility of autocracy to govern unruly Russia; a vision of the exceptionalist mission of Russian civilisation; the idea that Russia cannot be a great power without Ukraine and Crimea—and a glorious role in the world, relayed in spectacular television images to the Russian people. Pushkin understood what Potemkin had achieved for Catherine and Russia: ‘The glory of a name dear to his empress and his motherland…touched by the hand of history, he won us the Black Sea.’ Potemkin’s conquests, new cities and fleet are part of what makes this couple important two hundred years after their deaths.

In 2008, President Putin went to war against Georgia to reassert Russian hegemony there. In February 2014, he challenged American and European Union advances into independent Ukraine using unmarked Russian military units, the mysterious ‘green men’, to occupy and successfully annex Crimea—Russia’s first territorial recovery since the disastrous disintegration of the Soviet Union. Crimea had been part of the Russian Federation in Soviet times until Stalin, just before his death, decided to award it to Ukraine on an imperial whim: his successors transferred it in 1954. But it retained its military, imperial and mystical significance to Russia.

This lush peninsula had been the place where Vladimir the Great, Grand Prince of Kiev, had converted to Christianity in 988, an event cited by Potemkin in his letter to Catherine urging the immediate annexation of Crimea in 1783. In 2014, Putin declared ‘Crimea is as sacred to Russia as Jerusalem’s Temple Mount is to Judaism and Islam.’

After this success, Moscow launched a secret war to undermine independent Ukraine and detach the eastern part of the country: ‘New Russia’ was widely used to describe it, echoing Catherine and Potemkin. This opportunistic war—costing thousands of innocent lives, fought secretly by unmarked Russian army units and publically by nationalistic freebooters—was probably launched to confirm and stimulate the archaic if popular conviction that a Russia that dominates Ukraine is still a great Russia.

In 2015, Russia reasserted its traditional interests in the Middle East, when Putin spectacularly intervened in the vicious and complex Syrian civil war to back a long-term Soviet client regime, the Assad dynasty, with military force, a policy that echoed the path first tentatively followed by Catherine in the Ottoman provinces of Syria (when she backed Arab strongmen against the sultan in Constantinople and even occupied Beirut) and pursued more powerfully by Emperor Nicholas I and then the Soviets during the Cold War. But in a one-man regime, these were the policies of Vladimir Putin and their outcome will ultimately depend on his survival, the way he leaves power and the nature of his successors.

Catherine and Potemkin remain perhaps the most enlightened and humane rulers Russia has ever enjoyed—though the bar is not set particularly high. Brilliant and imaginative, tolerant and magnanimous, passionate and eccentric, extravagant and epicurean, industrious and ambitious, they were very different characters from today’s rulers, the grim children of the Soviet Union. Yet, strangely, in the twenty-first century, they are more relevant—and present—than ever.

Simon Sebag Montefiore

April 2016

PROLOGUE

  DEATH ON THE STEPPES

‘Prince of Princes’

Jeremy Bentham on Prince Potemkin

Whose bed – the earth: whose roof – the azure

Whose halls the wilderness round?

Are you not fame and pleasure’s offspring

Oh splendid prince of Crimea?

Have you not from the heights of honors

Been suddenly midst empty steppes downed?

Gavrili Derzhavin, The Waterfall

Shortly before noon on 5 October 1791, the slow cavalcade of carriages, attended by liveried footmen and a squadron of Cossacks in the uniform of the Black Sea Host, stopped halfway down a dirt track on a desolate hillside in the midst of the Bessarabian steppe. It was a strange place for the procession of a great man to rest: there was no tavern in sight, not even a peasant’s hovel. The big sleeping carriage, pulled by eight horses, halted first. The others – there were probably four in all – slowed down and stopped alongside the first on the grass as the footmen and cavalry escort ran to see what was happening. The passengers threw open their carriage doors. When they heard the despair in their master’s voice, they hurried towards his carriage.