Empress Elisabeth, Potiomkin was a Southerner, a Ukrainian. The men
of his family had followed either a military or a cloistered life.
His father was an obscure captain and an uncle, who had risen to the
rank of colonel, retired from the army to enter a monastery. Gregory
Potiomkin reversed his uncle’s course. He first became a monk or almost
became one, having spent several years in preparation travelling from
one monastery to the other. He was well versed in the theology of
the Greek Church and was extremely superstitious. His orthodoxy was
another aspect of her lover which Catherine, who prided herself on
being a free-thinker, did not like to expose. During the first year
that she lived with him, they made a pilgrimage through the old Russian
cloisters together. It happened that Prince Henry of Prussia was due to
pay a visit to Catherine during these months, but she wrote asking him
to postpone his visit until the following year. Usually she liked to
have foreign guests accompany her on her travels, but this time she did
not wish to combine the Protestant prince and the Greek theologian in
one religious pilgrimage.
Up to the age of thirty-five, when he became the favorite of the
Empress, Potiomkin seems to have had no love affairs and no idea of
marriage. He was deeply attached to his sister, whom, with her five
daughters, Catherine kept about the court. With one of his nieces,
Countess Branicky, Potiomkin was especially intimate. After he left
the Empress, this niece accompanied him everywhere. It was as if, like
Catherine, he was morbidly afraid of being left alone, and Sashinka
Branicky was obliged to be always with him. One of the scandals about
General Potiomkin was that, instead of galloping over the battlefield
on a war horse like General Suvarov, he usually appeared driving along
in a kibitka with Sashinka at his side. In this state, nevertheless,
he managed to cover a great deal of ground, for few Russians travelled
farther or more swiftly than did General Potiomkin. And always his
devoted niece was near at hand. How Sashinka found time to marry
and have children, as she did, is hard to explain. It has been said
that her relations with her uncle were not above reproach. If it was
true that a physical intimacy existed, there would have been nothing
shocking in the circumstances to the Russian Empress who had once
contemplated marriage with her Uncle George of Holstein and spoke in
later life almost regretfully of the unfulfilled engagement.
Potiomkin had been one of the original conspirators who had helped to
make Catherine the Empress. He had ridden to Peterhof in her train
on that white night in 1762 when she seized the Czar and imprisoned
him. He had been one of the guardsmen left in charge of the ex-Czar
at Ropsha, and he had been present at Peter’s death. Alexei Orlov’s
letter absolves him from all responsibility for the murder. The worst
that can be said of him in this connection is that with many others,
who were likewise not blamed, he also was present. The Empress did
not forget him during the next ten years, for she furthered his career
by sending him with a letter to General Razumovsky, who employed him
in the Turkish wars. His picture lay dormant in her mind through
all this time until it began to take on an increased vividness by
comparison with the actual presence of a Vassilchikov whose caresses
made her weep. The stories of Potiomkin’s wooing give him credit for an
amount of initiative which he did not have. In Catherine’s confession,
addressed to Potiomkin, she says that she deliberately recalled him to
Petersburg, whereas the current story tells how Potiomkin schemed to be
sent to the Little Mother with a painting and a message and how when he
got there he impetuously wooed her. The second story is the one which
the Empress would have much preferred to have us believe had her own
statements of what took place not weakened its credibility.
“Then came a certain hero,” she wrote. “This hero was, through his
services and his enduring tenderness, so wonderful that as soon as
people heard of his arrival they began to say that he ought to remain
here. They did not know of course that we had summoned him secretly
by a letter, but with the secret intention after his arrival not to
proceed quite blindly but to investigate whether that inclination
existed of which Bruce had spoken and which many had long suspected;
that is, the kind of inclination which I wished that he should have.”
It is not difficult to picture the impulsive Catherine sitting down
to her writing-table one fine morning to pen the letter which brought
Potiomkin to Petersburg as fast as a kibitka could carry him. The image
of the dark, morose man, biting his nails and glowering at the world,
which had slept so long at the bottom of the pool, had at last risen to
the surface and now floated there with a sharp commanding vividness.
Potiomkin’s time had come. The Empress sat down and addressed to the
hero whose image summoned her the letter which was to be the making of
his fortune. He came to Petersburg and for two years he remained in
close attendance on the Empress. He played his part in the Hermitage
gatherings in his own peculiar way. He was a ventriloquist and could
imitate to perfection the voices of various animals. He could reproduce
with uncanny accuracy the voice of Catherine herself uttering some
characteristic remark. This trick hugely delighted the Empress who had
also a gift for mimicry. In return, she would caterwaul a duet with the
Princess Dashkov who, like the Empress, was unable to carry a tune.
[Illustration: CATHERINE THE GREAT
_Painted by Ericsen for Baron Dimsdale_]
Potiomkin was a semi-Tartar in his habits. Slovenly and indolent,
he would lie on his couch for days clad only in a khalat. In the
same informal habit he would visit the Empress, to the horror of the
Europeans and the astonishment even of the Russians. Potiomkin fancied
himself in this informal costume, over and beyond the fact that the
lazy undress suited the inertia of his temperament. The loose khalat
was not unlike the monastic robe which he had once planned to wear and
which now and then, when things went wrong between himself and his
imperial mistress, he thought of putting on again. He was friendly with
all priests, with whom he spent much time, not, it appears, so much in
theological discussion, though he is said to have excelled in this, as
in card-playing and betting. His devotion to the Church is seen in
the way that he could stand motionless and decorous all day while mass
was being said. He was not physically too lazy for this effort although
otherwise so indolent that the formalities of Russian court life were
too arduous for him.
[Illustration: CATHERINE THE GREAT
_From a painting by Roslin_]
Many vindictive outré portraits of Catherine’s lover have been drawn
for posterity. Most of them were produced by French writers who could
not understand a man who, notwithstanding all the riches that his
mistress placed at his disposal, preferred to live as a Byzantine when
he might have lived as a Parisian. To the sophisticated French who
left most of the written accounts of Russia in the eighteenth century,
Potiomkin was scarcely a Russian; he was almost an Asiatic. The big
one-eyed man who sprawled on a couch all day in a bright dressing-gown,
playing with a handful of unset jewels or listening to Plutarch’s Lives
which some one read aloud, was a strange creature who had deliberately
turned his back on the civilization of Louis XV and France and who
yearned only to revive the ancient glories of Alexander the Great and
Constantinople.
The mere name of Alexander was an inspiration to Catherine and
Potiomkin: it had been the name of Potiomkin’s father and became the
name of Catherine’s grandson. It symbolized the magnificent dream
which united them. Together they would go to Constantinople. One day
Potiomkin burst forth, as he sprawled on his couch and listened to
Plutarch’s Lives, “If anyone should come today and tell me that I
should never go thither, I would shoot myself through the head.” In a
similar mood, though less violent, the satirical Empress threatened, in
case the Swedes bombarded her out of Petersburg, to set up her capital
in Constantinople. If she did not revive the Byzantine Empire, she
hoped that Monsieur Alexander, her grandson, would one day revive it in
her stead. United in their feverish dream, the Empress and her lover
drove in perfect unison toward their common hope. Together they would
one day enter Constantinople. For many years they passionately believed
it; and when they no longer believed it, they died.
4
Potiomkin, a true son of Ukrainia, was a troubadour. He composed a song
to his lady which became a popular lyric. “As soon as I beheld thee, I
thought of thee alone; thy lovely eyes captivated me, yet I trembled to
say I loved. To thee, love subjects every heart, and enchains them with
the same garlands. But, ah heaven, what a torment to love one to whom
I dare not declare it! One who can never be mine. Cruel gods, why have
you given her such charms? Or, why did you exalt her so high? Why did
you destine me to love her and her alone, her whose sacred name will
never pass my lips, whose charming image will never quit my heart.”
Catherine’s churlish lover was not poor in fancy. He could offer
tributes to his lady showing an imagination of no mean order. As he
composed lyrics in her honor, he could also compose pageants and other
exhibitions of great beauty and impressiveness. The famous journey to
the Crimea was a magnificent processional. Potiomkin’s arrangement
of this trip was the work of a poet and a dramatist as well as that
of a politician and a general. It employed all his talents at once.
His contrivance of effects along the way has been misunderstood.
Hence the legend of the “Potiomkin villages,” which according to his
detractors were mere painted façades overlooking the Volga and filled
with peasants and cattle who had travelled on foot many hundreds of
versts in order to complete the picture. That history should have
blamed instead of praising Potiomkin for his artistry shows how little
his mission in life and his share in Catherine’s grandiose schemes have
been understood. Both of them believed that the road to Constantinople
would one day be lined with prosperous villages and that the temporary
settlements thrown up at so much expense along the route would at no
great distance in the future become permanent establishments. No one
was deceived by the demonstration of prosperity, unless perhaps it was
Potiomkin himself, who half-way believed in the spectacular growth of
population induced suddenly by his own imagination aided by Catherine’s
rubles. Prince de Ligne, who accompanied the Empress on her Crimean
journey, tried to correct the story at the outset. “They have already
spread a ridiculous report,” he wrote to France, “that villages of
cardboard have been distributed along our route at intervals of a
hundred leagues, that paintings of vessels and cannons and cavalry
without horses are displayed.” The Prince persisted in his efforts
to send out to Europe a true description of the Crimean journey; but
he fared as all honest and unpicturesque journalists are destined to
fare. People preferred to believe in Potiomkin’s cardboard villages and
in the perfidy of their contriver who employed in their construction
millions of the Empress’s own rubles in order to deceive the Empress.
The story is still told to show to what nefarious depths Potiomkin was
willing to descend. What it really shows is that he was a daring artist
who designed and executed grandiose effects.
The Empress’s whole Crimean trip was a theatrical enterprise with
Potiomkin as author, producer, and actor. It followed soon after the
birth of her two grandsons whom she at first planned to take with her
though she abandoned the idea before the start was made. The purpose
of the journey was ostensibly to inspect the work of General Potiomkin
as administrator in the South. Its actual intention was political,
to reconnoitre the way to the Orient while hostilities between the
Russians and the Turks were in abeyance. No one understood this kind of
political game better than Potiomkin and his mistress. Ostentation was
the breath of their nostrils and for once they had their fill of it.
The Empress and her entourage proceeded down the Dnieper in a fleet of
twenty boats, each of which was named for some tributary of the stream.
Catherine’s own vessel was called the Dnieper and was fitted out with
mirrors and Turkish rugs, while a smooth green carpet covered the deck
like a meadow. Behind the gorgeous Dnieper floated the Bog, the vessel
in which Potiomkin travelled. Beneath a silken canopy, he lounged
among Turkish draperies, while Sashinka Branicky attended him. Behind
Potiomkin’s Bog came the other eighteen vessels filled with ladies and
gentlemen, musicians and dancers, cooks and lackeys, who strolled the
decks and counted the peasants along the shores. The whole social life
of the palace was transported to the Empress’s fleet; receptions and
balls and concerts followed each other as smoothly and uninterruptedly
as the bends of the flowing river followed each other southward. The
fleet had halcyon weather.
Most of the boats proceeded to Cherson, passing successfully the rapids
which the Russian peasants were afraid to navigate. One of the aims
of the trip was to quiet this popular fear by demonstrating a safe
passage. The laurels remain with Potiomkin for the Empress left the
fleet and proceeded by carriage along the last stretch of the journey.
The royal guest who rode in the carriage with her, the son of Maria
Theresa and the future Emperor of Austria, did not fancy perhaps the
idea of threading the Dnieper rapids. It seems unlikely that the
Empress herself avoided the adventure or feared the danger after she
had sailed so blithely and triumphantly into the hazards of inoculation.
At the end of the journey, the excitement was intense. All the world
had crowded into Cherson to see the Empress and her Prince. A room
for the night cost a thousand rubles and an egg for breakfast cost a
florin. Potiomkin was beside himself with joy. He ordered the gates of
the city to be moved several versts farther out and told the Empress
this had to be because the throng of visitors had decided to remain as
a permanent addition to the population. He believed it himself and the
Empress believed it with him. It was May and their dream was at fever
heat. Looking out over the harbor of Cherson toward Constantinople they
could believe anything.
They believed that the Empress of Russia was going to drive the Turks
out of Europe and the rest of Europe was going to thank her for her
services. In a kibitka they drove to the mouth of the Bog and the
Empress looked across the narrow water at Turkish land beyond and
lusted after it. The next day three new Russian ships were launched in
the harbor. Upon the blue expanse of water they floated down gently
and safely from their staples. A great triumphal arch had been reared,
on which was inscribed, in clear beautiful Greek lettering: “Here lies
the way to Constantinople.” The whole performance was dramatic and
picturesque to the last degree but not exactly diplomatic. The agents
of the French government in Constantinople, whose business it was to
manœuvre there against the designs of Russia, must have thought that
Catherine and Potiomkin were mad. And so they were, a little, but their
madness was a great driving force with which mere rational diplomacy
would have to reckon seriously.
There was method in the madness of the pair. The Empress employed the
same Machiavellian technique in the acquisition of the Crimea that
she had already used in Courland and in Poland. Her predatory art
was chiefly a matter of simple bribery, a method of bargaining in
which no monarch has ever excelled her. The credit, or the blame, for
Russia’s acquisition of the Crimea usually goes to Potiomkin. He was
at least the flawless negotiator of his lady’s bargain. The Khan was
slowly forced into a corner from which he could only escape by running
straight into the arms of the Empress. This was where he found himself
in April, 1783, just five years after Catherine’s visit to Cherson,
while Potiomkin took possession of his peninsula in the name of Russia.
The Khan, fleeing the wrath of the Turks, went to Petersburg to live
on the pension of a hundred thousand rubles which the Little Mother of
all the Russias had generously given him. Catherine had at last won
possession of the ancient land of Tauris where Iphigenia, snatched away
from her father’s house, once lived and reigned as a priestess among
barbarians.
Was it not something like this which had happened to the little Fike
of Stettin when she became Catherine of Russia and the priestess of
a foreign temple? Catherine and Potiomkin restored the ancient name
of Tauris to the peninsula and revived the Greek names of the towns
and seaports, hoping to call back the Greeks who had abandoned their
homes to the Tartars. To Potiomkin himself the Empress gave the title,
Prince of Tauris; and henceforth he swept magnificently through her
correspondence as the Taurian. Every mention of his name was invested
with the glamour of his heroic exploits.
5
When the Empress conquered through diplomacy, she never knew failure.
As an open aggressor, she was not a brilliant success. She avoided
war as long as possible and especially did she avoid war with Western
Europe. The Swedes forced her into a campaign of defence but she much
preferred to measure her troops against the Orientals. With all her
bluster and threats against the French Revolution, she failed to come
forward with actual military support of the intervention which she so
loudly urged and applauded. The Turkish wars were another matter. If
they could have been avoided by any possible exercise of diplomacy
and expenditure of rubles, no matter how great, they would never have
filled so many pages of history. Unfortunately for Catherine’s kind
of pacifism, Constantinople could not be bought. The Empress and
Potiomkin had gone as far in the conquest of the South as Machiavelli
could carry them. They had acquired by high bidding and sharp dealing
Crimea and Georgia, the Tauris and Colchis of the ancient Greeks
redolent with memories of Iphigenia and Medea and the Golden Fleece.
But the Empress had no thought of stopping there. Crimea and
Georgia only fed the flame of her passion for the East. She watched
Constantinople as a cat watches a mouse-hole, with a fascinated
attention which nothing could divert. But France did not want the
Russians in the temple of Sophia and England was fast coming to share
this view. If the Empress had been a little less concentrated and
had watched her mouse-hole a little less confidently she would have
realized earlier than she did the strength of the opposition which
was growing up against her in Western Europe and which was carefully
preparing to defeat her aims. Behind Mustapha and the Turks, whom she
regarded as the enemy, stood a strong wall of diplomacy raised by the
western powers. Catherine’s phantasy overleaped this wall. For her,
beyond Constantinople lay only India. She believed the way was still as
open as it had been for Peter the Great when he dreamed of taking it.
The dream was now hers, as she was now Peter. She conducted her
campaign against the Turks as Peter had conducted his campaign more
than half a century before, and her preparations for war, imitating
his, were in many respects even worse. There were not enough recruits
for the companies; there were not enough tents for the men; the powder
was half dust; all the supplies were either defective or deficient
and graft and autocracy were everywhere. The Russians lost their first
battles, but everybody was gay about it. Voltaire wrote to Catherine:
“I see with joy and surprise that this convulsion has in no way shaken
the composure of that great man whose name is Catherine.” He might have
added that Peter the Great with all his six feet seven could not have
borne the defeat with greater steadfastness and courage.
The Pforte, instigated by the French, declared war against the Russians
in 1768. The following year Gregory Potiomkin joined the army under
General Rumiantsov, whom he afterwards displaced as leader of the
forces against the Turks. After five years of undistinguished service
he was summoned to Petersburg by the Empress and stopped there for two
years idle in her boudoir. From this time onward Gregory Potiomkin was
a changed man. Although he trembled at the sound of guns, he could
fight the enemy at times with the fierceness of a tiger and the cunning
of a serpent. At court he went about like a savage, barefoot, without
breeches, unwashed and uncombed. At the front, these simplicities
gave him a degree of independence beyond the other officers. He could
live for days on onions alone and the ordinary comforts of life meant
nothing to him. It was said that Potiomkin was in most ways a creature
of the eleventh and not the eighteenth century anyway. When he went
forth to war his eleventh century side came uppermost and found there
its congenial expression. He was not unhappy at the front except when
the guns roared, and as long as Sashinka stood by to comfort him he
could endure even that.
The first Turkish War should, according to the general expectation,
have ended with the Congress of Fokshani. The Empress, her foreign
minister in Petersburg, and especially the Russian minister in
Constantinople who happened to be in a Turkish prison awaiting peace
for his release, were all surprised and disappointed at the outcome
of the Congress. They had expected a satisfactory treaty. But Gregory
Orlov, who represented Russia, suddenly departed for Petersburg
while the negotiations were still in the air. A rumor of disaster in
his private affairs had suddenly reached him, and fearing that his
relations with the Empress were threatened he dashed away to reassure
himself. We know how suddenly his journey ended, in arrest and
quarantine at Gatchina. His nerves were never quite the same again,
and no wonder. The shock was extreme, even for a military officer and
a stalwart man. His eccentricities of behaviour increased after this
experience but they did not begin there. Looking back over Orlov’s
previous life it is easy to see that his disorganized state of mind
would have made the peace congress at Fokshani a failure even if all
the other conditions had been favorable.
The Empress was philosophical, as well she might be. She was obliged
again to correspond with the Sultan with cannon balls, as she wrote
to Voltaire. The war dragged on for two years longer, while the
handsome Vassilchikov occupied Orlov’s apartments and made the Empress
weep whenever he grew tender. In July, 1774, came the Peace of
Kutchuk-Kainardi. Potiomkin signed this treaty. He had displaced the
unsuccessful Vassilchikov four months before and was now the Empress’s
envoy to the Turks. She was enchanted with the terms he made. “Ah!
What a good head the man has. He has had a greater share than anyone
in this peace, and this sound head of his is as amusing as the devil.”
She hung her darling with blazing orders and collected honors for him
from foreign sovereigns. Potiomkin loved his decorations and adored
his jewels. There were occasions when he pinned the whole exhibit on
his velvet coat until his chest was panoplied with gold and silver and
diamonds. In the midst hung a portrait of the Empress at which people
gazed intently while talking to him for they dared not gaze at the
black patch which he wore over his eye. This was General Potiomkin on
those rare occasions when he considered a dressing-gown not admissible.