Catherine the Great & Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair

‘Good morning sweetheart,’ Catherine greeted Potemkin playfully around this time, ‘…I got up and sent to the Vice-Chancellor asking for the ribbons; I wrote that they were for…General Potemkin and I planned to put them on him after mass. Do you know him? He’s handsome, he’s as clever as he is handsome. And he loves me as much as he’s handsome and clever and I love him too…’.²⁸ That day, he got the Russian Order of St Alexander Nevsky and the Polish Order of the White Eagle, kindly sent by King Stanislas-Augustus. There was prestige in these orders, though the higher nobility regarded them as their due: one of Potemkin’s more winning characteristics was his childish delight in medals. Soon he had collected Peter the Great’s Order of St Andrew; Frederick the Great sent the Prussian Black Eagle; Denmark sent the White Elephant; Sweden the Holy Seraphim. But Louis XVI and Maria Theresa refused the Holy Ghost and the Golden Fleece respectively, claiming they were only for Catholics. In London, George III was shocked by his ambassador’s attempt to procure Potemkin the Garter.²⁹

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‘It seems the Empress is going to commit the reins of government to Potemkin,’ Gunning told London. Indeed the unthinkable had happened: Potemkin was now Prince Orlov’s superior. The foreign ambassadors could not swallow this. They had become so used to the Orlovs that they could not believe that they were not about to return to power at any minute. The Orlovs could not believe it either.

Prince Orlov stormed in to see Catherine on 2 June – an alarming sight, even for an Empress. ‘They say’, reported the well-informed Gunning, ‘Orlov and Catherine had it out.’³⁰ Prince Orlov had always been good-natured, but now he was permanently and dangerously irascible. His temper, once released, was fearsome. Indeed Catherine called him a ‘madcap’ and was upset by whatever Orlov said to her. But she was capable of dealing with him too: he agreed ‘to travel abroad’ again. She did not care. She had Potemkin: ‘Goodnight my friend. Send to tell me tomorrow how you are. Bye – I’m very bored without you.’³¹

On 9 June, Rumiantsev took the offensive against the Turks, despatching two corps across the Danube, which defeated their main army near Kozludzhi. This cut the Grand Vizier off from the Danubian forts. Russian cavalry galloped south past Shumla into today’s Bulgaria.

Catherine and Potemkin were sorry to learn of the sudden death from fever of Pugachev’s vanquisher, Bibikov, but the Rebellion seemed over and they appointed the mediocre Prince Fyodor Shcherbatov to succeed him. Suddenly, in early July, Catherine learned that Pugachev, despite his defeats, had resurfaced with another army. She sacked Shcherbatov and appointed another, General Prince Peter Golitsyn: ‘I’m sending you my dear the letter that I’ve done to Prince Shcherbatov. Correct it please and then I’ll have it read to the Council.’ The Empress wrote optimistically to Potemkin, ‘it’ll hit the nail on the head’.³²

On 20 June, the Turks sued for peace: usually this would have meant a truce, a congress and the months of negotiating that had ruined the last peace talks. This is where Potemkin’s advice to ‘empower’ Rumiantsev bore fruit, because the Field-Marshal set up camp in the Bulgarian village of Kuchuk-Kainardzhi and told the Turks that either they signed peace or the two armies went back to war. The Ottomans began to talk; news of a peace treaty was expected any day; Catherine’s spirits rose. Everything was going so well.

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A new Pugachev crisis struck Catherine in mid-July. On the 11th, Pugachev appeared before the ancient and strategic city of Kazan with a swelling army of 25,000. The supposedly defeated Pugachev was not defeated at all, but he was being pursued by the true hero of the Rebellion, the tirelessly competent Lieutenant-Colonel Ivan Mikhelson. Kazan was a mere 93 miles from Nizhny Novgorod and that was just over a hundred miles from Moscow itself. The old Tartar city, conquered by Ivan the Terrible in 1556, had 11,000 inhabitants and mainly wooden buildings. It happened that General Pavel Potemkin, the new appointee to run both the Kazan and Orenburg Secret Commissions, had arrived in Kazan on 9 July, two days before Pugachev. The old Governor was ill. Pavel Potemkin took over the command, but he possessed only 650 infantry and 200 unreliable Chuvash cavalry, so he barricaded his forces in the citadel. On the 12th, Pugachev stormed Kazan, which was razed in an infernal orgy of violence that lasted from 6 a.m. to midnight. Anyone in ‘German dress’ or without a beard was killed; women in ‘German dress’ were delivered to the pretender’s camp. The city was reduced to ashes before Pugachev’s army escaped, leaving Pavel Potemkin to be rescued by Mikhelson.