Part 18

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.

During the Second Turkish War, Catherine wrote to her lover twice every week. In her letters she showered him with pet names as in public she hung him with orders. He was her belovedest, her little love, her gold pheasant, her Papa. So she spurred him on to battle with the Turks. It was not easy. The Ukrainian either stormed ahead or collapsed in moods of desperate discouragement. There were days when he was ready to evacuate the Crimea and to resign his generalship in favor of Rumiantsov, his detested rival. “You are as impatient as a five-year-old child,” the Empress chided, “while the business entrusted to you demands unshakable patience.” The General was subject to frequent relapses to his five-year-old emotions and in such moods he was ready to abandon all to the Turks if the Empress’s letters had not served to restore his aggressiveness. She had urgent need to write him twice a week. The Prince of Tauris was ready to give up Tauris itself whenever these pessimistic moods overcame him.

The Empress was distressed by the terrible cost of war. She discovered that it was even more expensive than diplomacy and bribery. Up to the unpleasantness with the Turks, she had managed to get her way by means of money and lively military display. But it seemed that actual warfare demanded an additional expenditure of treasure. She complained to the sculptor, Falconet, “To make war three things are necessary: money, money, money.” Yet she was always able to find the wherewithal to carry on and keep her three quarrelsome generals, Potiomkin, Suvarov, and Rumiantsov, active in the field.

She built a fleet and planned to sweep the Black Sea with it. The Russians, in spite of the efforts of Great Peter, had never become navigators, a deficiency which obliged her to import her naval officers from England. The scheme was easily carried out. The English were employable and adjustable, and all went well until the Empress had the idea, inspired from Paris by Dr. Benjamin Franklin, of adding the American naval officer, John Paul Jones, to her forces. The American hero’s exploits resounded at the moment through Europe while he himself was sojourning in Paris, rather lonely, very famous, and extremely hard up. The Empress met his terms, which were sufficiently high, for Jones was a good bargainer, and the American was soon sailing a Russian ship on the Black Sea. But luck, it seems, had deserted the little man. He not only played an undistinguished part in the Turkish wars but left Russia under the shadow of a personal scandal, invented, his defenders said, by British officers serving under Catherine who resented the presence of the colonial in the same navy with themselves. However, that may be, he earned no honorable mention in Russia and the history of that country gives no credit to John Paul Jones for helping to win the Turkish Wars.

In June, 1788, Catherine’s fleet won the battle of Otchakov. The victory made a great impression on Europe and even Frederick the Great spoke of it respectfully. Was the Empress really marching toward India? She believed that she was marching toward Constantinople at least and that the Prince of Tauris would enter the Turkish city within the year. But France and Prussia and England thought otherwise. English policy was well clarified by now and was neatly expressed in a book on Russia published by an English captain in the year 1790. “The Turks,” he said, “happily for us, are not a commercial people; we cannot do without those valuable articles which their soil produces almost spontaneously; and the Turks, like the easy possessor of a very rich mine, allow us to enrich ourselves at our pleasure. Three per cent. duty equally on all exports and imports is, with little exception, their only restriction to Europeans engaged in their trade. Would the Empress be equally moderate, if in possession of the fertile region? Believe me, she would not.”

It appeared that Europe did not wish to be cleansed of the Turks by Catherine the Great. The easy-going Mussulman with his three per cent. duty had great advantages over a Christian monarch like the Russian Empress. The representatives of Protestant Europe in Constantinople put their heads together and backed up Turkish diplomacy in the south while the King of Sweden prepared to invade Russia on the north. The Swedish invader was Gustavus III, the son of the Princess Ulrica whose gown had once been offered to Princess Fike to make her presentable at the German court. Ulrica’s son had a curious relationship with Cousin Catherine of Russia. He paid friendly visits and wrote flattering letters to her and then made war on her. As soon as the treaty was signed, he wrote and asked her to forget their differences, “like a storm that has passed.” The passing storm, however, had shaken the Empress as she had seldom been shaken. She was not prepared to carry on war on two fronts and the Swedish invasion had made the Turkish Wars no longer endurable. “If you wish to roll a stone from my heart,” she wrote to Potiomkin on the Turkish front, “if you wish to free me from a heavy nightmare, then send a courier at once to the army with instructions to begin operations immediately by sea and by land; otherwise you will drag out this war still longer and that you can wish just as little as I.”

Potiomkin was unable to make an attack or to conclude a treaty. He had reached the same state of mind which had rendered Gregory Orlov incompetent to negotiate terms with the Turks at Fokshani in 1772. Orlov’s mental inertia on that occasion had caused the first Turkish War to drag on two years longer. The history of Orlov was repeated by Potiomkin in 1791. Potiomkin’s relations with the Empress were threatened in that year as Orlov’s had been threatened in 1772. Potiomkin felt that it was time for him to go to Petersburg and dismiss “the little black boy” who seemed to be settling into his place there with an air of permanence.

As soon as Potiomkin departed from the field, Prince Repnin took command and brought the second Turkish War to a speedy close. The treaty of Jassy was signed at the end of 1791. But Potiomkin was already dead.

6

The myth about Catherine the Great relates that she had three hundred lovers. The same legend is attached to the Empress Elisabeth and the mother of Sergei Saltikov. It belongs to the Russian fable.

There is no need to speculate on the number of lovers that Catherine had; she has herself told us the facts. Besides her husband, there were twelve. After she became Empress she made no secret of her love affairs, but rather the contrary. The only place where any vagueness exists is in the beginning before the birth of Paul. Her German biographer, Gertrud Kircheisen, as well as Bilbassov, thinks that her early intimacy with Andrei Chernichev must have gone farther than she admits in her memoirs. Chernichev was banished from the court on her account and Catherine’s letters to him, discovered in later years, suggest that their relations were not merely platonic. But Catherine’s memoirs are not the only evidence we have concerning her lovers. Her confession to Potiomkin leaves him out. In this document, which has all the marks of a genuine confession, she tells Potiomkin that he is the fifth. The favorites of Catherine as Empress were a public institution and their number was certainly no secret. After Potiomkin there were seven.

They were: Zavadovsky, her secretary, who was one of the most intellectual of her lovers and minister of public instruction under her grandson, Alexander I; Zoritch, the Serbian, who afterwards founded a school for boys in the country; Rimsky-Korsakov, a sergeant of the guards, the most beautiful and the most stupid of them all, who ordered a library to fit the shelves of his house; Lanskoy, with whom she is said to have had only platonic relations and who died in her arms; Yermalov, the “white nigger” whom Potiomkin dismissed from the palace on a day’s notice; Mamonov, a man of some ability, who married one of her court ladies and eliminated himself from office; and Plato Zubov, the young man of twenty-four who became her lover when she was sixty and lived with her until her death.

Altogether there were thirteen men with whom the Empress made, so to speak, twelve unhappy marriages. The Russians accepted her arrangements without much comment; the irregularity of her relationships did not trouble them. What did scandalize them, however, was the frequency with which she changed the incumbent of the office. She would dismiss her Adjutant General one day and install another the next day, and her fickleness seemed to increase with her years.