Catherine the Great & Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair

Pugachev arrived in the land of the Don Cossacks before Tsaritsyn,^*2 and learned the hard way that a pretender is never honoured in his own country. When he parleyed with Don Cossacks, they realized that ‘Peter III’ was the boy they remembered as Emelian Pugachev. They did not rally. Pugachev, still with 10,000 rebels, fled downriver and was then arrested by his own men. ‘How dare you raise your hands against your emperor!’, he cried. It was to no avail. The ‘Amperator’ had no clothes left. He was handed over to Russian forces in Yaiksk, where the Rebellion had started a year earlier. There was a glut of forceful and ambitious soldiers on the Lower Volga – Pavel Potemkin, Panin, Mikhelson and Alexander Suvorov – among whom there was an undignified scrummage to claim credit for capturing the ‘state villain’ even though none of them had actually done so. Suvorov delivered Pugachev to Peter Panin, who refused to allow Pavel Potemkin to interrogate him.⁴² Like children telling tales to their teachers, they spent August to December writing complaints to Petersburg. Often their contradictory letters arrived on the same day.⁴³ Now that the crisis was over and the lovers were in firm control, Catherine and Potemkin were half outraged, half amused by this squabbling. ‘My love,’ wrote Catherine some time in September, ‘Pavel is right. Suvorov had no more part in this [capture of Pugachev] than Thomas [her dog].’ Potemkin spoke for everyone when he wrote to Peter Panin: ‘We are all filled with joy that the miscreant has come to an end.’⁴⁴

Peter Panin had the bit between his teeth. He even killed some of the witnesses. When he got his hands on the pretender himself, who had served unnoticed under him at Bender in the war, he slapped him across the face and made him kneel. He brought him out and slapped him again for every curious visitor – except Pavel Potemkin, whose job it was to question him.⁴⁵ Catherine and Potemkin neatly cut this Gordian knot by dissolving the Kazan Commission to create the Special Commission of the Secret Department of the Senate in Moscow, which was to arrange Pugachev’s trial. They appointed Pavel Potemkin to it⁴⁶ – but not Panin. Potemkin was obviously protecting his cousin’s interests, and his own, for Catherine told him: ‘I hope all Pavel’s quarrels and dissatisfactions come to an end when he receives my orders to go to Moscow.’ In the midst of the politics, she added: ‘Sweetheart, I love you very much and wish that pill would cure you of all illness. But I ask you to abstain: eat just soup and tea without milk.’⁴⁷

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Peter Panin ‘now decorated rural Russia with a forest of gallows’, according to one modern historian.⁴⁸ ‘The murderers [of officials]’, declared Panin in a circular that was not approved by Catherine, ‘and their accomplices shall be put to death first by cutting off their hands and feet and then their heads and placing the bodies on blocks beside thoroughfares…those villages in which they were murdered or betrayed shall…hand over the guilty by drawing lots, every third man to be hanged…and if by this means they still do not give them up, then every 100^th man by lot shall actually be hanged from the rib and all remaining adults to be flogged…’.

Panin boasted to Catherine that he did not shrink from ‘spilling of the damned blood of state miscreants’.⁴⁹ The hanging from the rib, which he specified, was performed on a forgotten delicacy – the glagoly, a special form of gallows in the shape of a small letter ‘r’ but with a longer arm, from which victims were hanged by the rib, held in place by a metal hook that was inserted behind their ribs and threaded through.⁵⁰ This macabre exhibition was the last thing Catherine wanted Europe to see, but Panin claimed that it was only to act as a deterrent. Rebels were trussed up on gallows on rafts and sent down the Volga, their corpses decaying on these amphibious gibbets. In fact, far fewer miscreants were executed that one might expect, though there must have been many cases of rough justice. Only 324, many of them renegade priests and nobles, were officially sentenced to death, which, considering the scale of the Rebellion, compares well to the English reprisals after the 1745 Battle of Culloden.⁵¹

The Yaik Cossack Host where the Rebellion had begun was abolished and renamed. In a foretaste of the Soviet fashion for renaming places after their leaders, Catherine ordered that Zimoveyskaya stanitsa,⁵² Pugachev’s home village on the far bank of the Don, should be renamed Potemkinskaya, erasing, in Pushkin’s elegant words, ‘the gloomy remembrance of the rebel with the glory of a new name that was becoming dear to her and the Motherland’.⁵³

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